After a while, under the influence of Lily, with a little help from the bottle of Merlot by his side, he stopped looking nervously at his watch every few minutes. He seemed to have forgotten the existence of his nasal spray. He even looked up from his glass to blow a kiss in Claire’s direction. “Lovely girl,” he said to me, or maybe it was “lucky girl.” His voice was a bit too adenoidal to tell.
And that’s when the phone rang. It was about 11:00 p.m. Claire had a tray of hot pears in her hand and bent to put them down. Jake and Rowena were still giggling. Johnny was examining the back of a spoon. Tom, who had been helping her whip some cream, was standing by the phone. Claire made a gesture at him to pick it up.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello? Hello?”
He put the phone back on the counter. “No one there,” he said.
Almost immediately, it rang again. This time, Tom handed it to Claire.
“Hello.” Pause. “It’s Claire speaking.” Longer pause. “Yes, I have . . . Yes, he is. I’m not prepared to discuss that with you.” She had gone very red but the blood was now draining away, except for two spots high on her cheeks. Her lips were pale. We’d all stopped talking now. Marcus had stood up. He had his hand out for the phone. Claire said, magisterial, the actors’ daughter, “I repeat I am not prepared to discuss that with you. It is my personal business. If you wish to talk to Marcus he is here and you may do so . . . Right. . . . I’m sorry to hear that, but you must understand it is not my concern. Marcus is an adult. I am an adult.” Long pause. “I’m sorry, I’m not prepared to listen to this, and I’m going to . . .” She looked as if she was about to hang up, but Marcus grabbed her arm before she could do so, took the phone from her, and left the room.
Claire sat down abruptly in the empty seat next to Jake and burst into tears. She buried her head on Jake’s shoulder. He patted her hair.
“Hey, hey,” he said softly.
Tom and Lily took over then. “Right,” said Tom. “What was all that about?”
“Tell all,” said Lily.
Claire took her head out from under Jake’s hand and said, through her tears, “She was so horrible. How dare she? She has no right to ring me during a dinner party and say those things. If Marcus wants to leave her for me, it’s not my fault, is it? What she’s going through shouldn’t be any of my business. It’s his; not mine.”
Her emotion slunk across the room, like dry ice. Most of us shifted in our seats, suddenly awkward and embarrassed, keen to keep our feet out of it. I wanted to hear what Marcus was saying. But he’d closed the door.
Rowena said, “Come off it, Claire. He’s a married man. You knew he was a married man. Just like the last one. Married men tend to have wives. And quite a few of them—including this one—have kids. So I have to say it is your business.”
Claire looked daggers at her sister and said, “But it’s not my fault that I fell in love with him. I didn’t have a choice.”
“I don’t think you’re in love with him,” said Rowena. “Not really. And anyway, there’s always a choice. You knew he had a wife and kids when you met him. You could have walked away.”
Claire said unconvincingly, “I didn’t know actually. He didn’t tell me about the meat and two veg until our second date.”
“ ‘Meat and two veg’?” echoed Rowena.
Claire looked flustered. “Wife and two kids. You know what I mean . . .” She glanced round the room, and said to the rest of us. “Look, all I’m saying is, we don’t choose who we fall in love with and when Cupid steps in and takes over . . .”
“Come off it.” Rowena was looking more and more irritated. “Cupid? Which planet are you on? Look, Claire, think about it. Is Marcus the one? Isn’t he just the result of panic? What about . . .”
Claire said, “But Ro—” She slumped. She looked suddenly tired.
Tom said quickly, “Those pears look delicious. Let’s eat them before they get cold.”
Claire picked up the serving dish and was about to dole them out when Marcus came back into the kitchen, looking, despite the orange glow and the exaggerated stripes, like an old man. He said to Claire, his head bent, “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to go.”
“You can’t,” she said wearily. “You’ve only just come.”
“Look, look,” he said, trying to draw her into some privacy in the shelter of the fridge. “Look, I’ve got to go,” he whispered intensely. “She’s in a state. She’s got the letter. She knows. But Alfie has got a high temperature. She’s rung the doctor, but they don’t know what time they’ll be able to come. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to be there.” There were a couple of loud sniffs as the inhaler came back into use. “I’ll ring you,” he said, backing out the door. “Tomorrow. I promise.”
“Fucking hell,” she said quietly after the front door had closed. “Sorry everyone, but . . . Fuck.”
Jake, who had been silent through all this, said, “I didn’t much like him anyway.”
For a moment, I thought Claire was about to laugh. It could have gone either way. But she didn’t laugh. She stood up. She said, enunciating every word very clearly, “Fuck you too,” and threw the whole plate of pears on the floor. Luckily they’d cooled down, so no one was hurt.
“Why did you say that?” I asked Jake in the car. “I can’t believe you said it. It was so tactless. Why did you have to inflame the situation? Do you know him or something? You were very odd. And—” I thought I might as well throw it in for good measure, “what was all that flirting with Rowena?”
Jake looked pensive. I was driving. He was slumped against the passenger window. He said, “Calm down. It’s just that it all seemed such a charade.”
“You didn’t help. If you hadn’t been so late getting there, we’d have eaten earlier and people wouldn’t have got so drunk.”
“I didn’t help?” He was laughing. “What about Claire didn’t help? Or Martin or Marcus or whatever he’s called, didn’t help? Or what about his wife not helping?”
“Marcus. His name is Marcus. And his wife at least had reason.”
Jake put his feet up on the dashboard. He seemed oblivious to my mood. He said, chuckling, “Meat and two veg. I haven’t heard that one before.”
“It’s not funny,” I said.
The next night, Claire rang to apologize. Jake was still out. He hadn’t rung but I assumed he was at work or at some “do” or another. I had made myself a bowl of pasta with butter and some parsley from the pot on the window ledge and was about to settle down in front of the television, congratulating myself on my ability, “do less” to “make do,” when the phone rang. I thought it might be Mel—I hadn’t heard from her for a few days—or Fran with some new life-threatening symptom. Neither of them minded me multitasking, in this case chewing while chatting (though Mel got a bit twitchy if she knew I was having a pee while we were on the phone; I had to line the bowl with bathroom tissue to dull the sound). Anyway, it wasn’t. It was Claire.
“Hello. How are you?” I said, swallowing and trying to suppress the surprise in my voice, wanting to say, Why do you keep ringing? Don’t you have any other friends? What is it with you? Deep down, though, I was flattered, Maggie the schoolgirl sunbathing in Claire’s attention.
She said in a small voice, “Are you in?”
“Er. yes.”
“It’s just that I need someone to talk to. I’m so sorry about last night. I really lost it. I think I’m going mad. I just wondered if I could ask your advice. You were so astute the other day.”
“Is this about Marcus?” I said. “I don’t know if there’s anything more I can say to help.”
“Marcus and . . . you know. I’m so confused. Please, Maggie? You’ve always been there for me. In the past . . .”
“Sure,” I said, doubtfully. I tried to remember an occasion when I’d “been there for her” when we were teenagers. I did find her crying once in the bathroom, shortly after the Pizza Hut incident. I think I cop
ied out my wordsheet of Bohemian Rhapsody to cheer her up. I didn’t know if I could do anything similar now. “Come round. Jake’s out so I’m on my own. Come and have a drink.”
She said, “Oh. Where is he . . . Jake?”
I had taken another surreptitious mouthful. I swallowed quickly. “At work.”
“Oh.” She sounded puzzled. It was past nine, which was nothing these days, but I couldn’t lose face.
“Late meeting,” I said. “But he’ll probably be back quite soon.”
“Oh, right,” she said.
I plumped up some cushions, assuming she’d be around any minute. I set the video up to tape ER. I waited. Forty-five minutes went by before I caught the small thump and clatter that means someone is about to knock at the door. Except there wasn’t a knock. There was a louder clatter that means someone is letting themselves in with a key.
“Hi,” said Jake, coming into the sitting room.
I was about to warn him about Claire when at that moment there was a knock at the door.
“That’ll be Claire,” I said.
He stood stock still, as if he’d been stung. His nose wrinkled in disbelief.
It was an extreme reaction, but I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I went to let her in. She was looking fetchingly tearful, though I noticed her mascara hadn’t run. Her hair was damp at the ends as if she’d just washed it. Jake was still standing where I’d left him when we came into the sitting room.
She said, hurling her bag onto the sofa, “Marcus has gone back to his wife.”
Jake shrugged unfeelingly. “That was obvious.”
I said, trying to nudge him out into the kitchen, “Oh Claire, I’m so sorry. What Jake means is that last night . . .”
She said, dramatically, “He rang me this morning. After all that. I really believed him. He said we’d buy a place in Epsom so he could be near the kids. He said we’d get married when the divorce came through. He said we could start a family. I mean, Christ, I’m thirty-six. I thought I’d finally found a man I could trust, someone who was prepared to commit.”
Jake snorted. I tried to suppress an image of Claire in Surrey, at Butterfly World or Chessington, with truculent step-kids in tow, a baby wailing in a sling. I said, “I’m so sorry, Claire.”
Jake said, “So he wasn’t so trustworthy after all.”
“Well, at least he almost left his wife,” said Claire quickly. “Unlike . . . many men.”
“But he didn’t, did he?” said Jake coolly.
“Well, he might still.”
“What? When his son’s temperature goes down? What happens next time the little lad gets a cold?”
“Well . . .”
“How trustworthy, how committed, is that?”
“Jake,” I said with a laugh, trying to brush over his insensitivity. “You can take your bad day out on me, but not on Claire. She’s upset. Leave her alone. Claire, ignore him.”
Claire sat down on the sofa; the cushions whooshed as they deflated beneath her. She said quietly, “Oh, it’s all a mess. Rowena’s right: I don’t even know if my heart was in it. But then that makes it all the more awful that he’s left me. I can’t even keep the second division interested.” She looked at the back of her hands and then she looked at Jake. “Of course Maggie said it first: I’m still in love with . . . with someone else.”
“Maggie said what?” Jake sounded perturbed.
I explained. “Her ex. Also married.” I tried not to sound censorious.
Claire said, still looking at Jake, “I am, you know. I can’t get him out of my head. If I’m honest with myself, he was why I came back from New York.”
“What about Marcus?” said Jake.
“Even when I was with Marcus, he was the first thing I thought of in the morning, the last thing I thought of at night. I can’t forget him.”
Jake was staring at her. I said, “I know what we need: tea.” And when Jake didn’t get the hint, I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. When I came back into the room, a few minutes later, they were both sitting down on the sofa. Jake had his arm along the back of it. Claire was leaning forward, with her head down, her hair hanging like a veil. They were talking softly. Claire looked up at me when I came into the room. She seemed more cheerful.
When I put the tray down in front of her, she said, “Shall I be mother?”
“You’d better not be,” Jake said, which made Claire smile.
Chapter 13
We had a bad night that night. Dan was cutting a molar and started crying shortly after Jake and I went to sleep. He was hot so I loosened his bedclothes and gave him a bottle to soothe him. I was stroking his head through the bars of his crib, on my knees in my pajamas, listening to the rhythmic glugs and snuffles, when Fergus stirred and got out of bed. He was half asleep, still in the middle of a dream, and he went rigid when I tried to pick him up, pulling his head away from me as if I was a night-fright monster, ready to jam his heels into my stomach, on the border of tantrum, and it took a while for me to calm him down. By the time he had woken up enough to snuggle into me, Dan had dropped off and I didn’t want to risk waking him again by trying to settle Fergus, so I took Fergus into our room. Jake grunted when he realized what was going on, poured himself out the other side of the bed, and went off to sleep in the spare room.
I lay there, curled around my son, feeling the bones in his back through his pajamas, one arm encircling his head, sensing the warmth of him, filling my nostrils with the smell of crayons and Mr. Bubble, until he pushed me closer and closer to the edge of the bed. And then I lay there, gripping the sheet, uncomfortable, uneasy, as Jake’s side grew cold, wondering why I felt so distant from him, and whether we’d ever make love again.
In the morning, after Jake had left, Mrs. Allardyce—minus raincoat in honor of July—came to the door to check if I could still take her to the hospital the following day. She came into the kitchen and had some tea and a comforting moan about the noise and the litter from Pizza Express. When Dan came and clung to her support stockings, she called him “Lamb” and she did “Two Little Dickey Birds” for Fergus, using two bits of tissue on her knobbly fingers. A few minutes after she left, she came back with a packet of custard creams. “There you are, dear,” she said, pressing it into my hand. “They can have some of these for their tea.”
“You can get people so wrong,” I told Jake later when he came in.
“Hm?” he said.
“Mrs. Allardyce. She’s really quite nice and . . .”
“Good,” he said, looking up absentmindedly from his bank statement. “Good.”
I left him to it, found a beer in the fridge, and went into the sitting room to watch my tape of the previous night’s ER.
I wouldn’t have thought anything of the phone call, if he hadn’t taken it into the garden. When I heard it ring, I paused the television to hear if it was for me and then when Jake opened the garden doors, I went into the hall to see what he was doing. He had taken the phone over to the bench under the apple tree and was sitting there, legs apart, head bent in concentration. He was too far away to hear from the hall so I slipped into the kitchen and stood to the side of the open window. The light in the garden was only just fading and there were swallows swooping in the navy sky.
Jake didn’t say much at first; he just seemed to be listening. Then he said, “Yes,” and “I know, I know.” And then there was another long silence at the end of which he gave a sequence of sighs and then he sort of groaned and said, “You’re very persuasive. Did anyone ever tell you that?” And finally, as if conceding, he said, “Okay. Okay. Lunch tomorrow. Ring me at work in the morning just to check. No, she won’t . . . No . . . all right . . . No fine. One-ish. Okay, Claire. Bye.”
I hadn’t moved. I was standing in the same place. In the same kitchen, gripping the sill as if a wind was ripping through my house. There was a delay between hearing the information and feeling it, as when you stub your toe and there’s a moment of nothing wh
en you think you’ve gotten away with it before the pain hits you. And then it hit me. Claire. Claire Masterson, who always had to have everything I had. Jake was the married man she was in love with. The love of her life. At some point, Jake had had an affair with Claire. And now she wanted him back.
Everything suddenly fell into place. The way they had danced at her party, as if they knew each other better than they should have. His attitude at finding her in our house the day he got back from Amsterdam. The fact that she knew about Kyushi. That he knew about Disney on that first night, before I’d even mentioned it. The smell of smoke on his clothes. His oddly detached attitude at dinner the other night and in our house the evening after. His behavior toward Marcus. And his complete lack of interest in sex. With me, at least. This sense I’d had recently that he was slipping away from me, that his life was elsewhere. And her new friendship with me? Ringing me up all the time, coming around whenever she could, inviting us to everything, wheedling herself into my, our, his, life. I’d thought, foolish me, she’d wanted to be my friend. But she hadn’t, had she? She’d come back from America, determined to get him again, and he must have said no, so at the same time as stringing poor old Marcus along, she’d just used me to get close to him, to thrust herself under his nose, to insinuate herself back into his heart.
I was back on the sofa in front of ER when Jake came in from the garden and started clanking about in the kitchen cupboards. After a short while, he came into the sitting room with a pot of coffee on a tray. “Who rang?” I said, without moving my eyes from the screen. I waited what seemed like a million years for him to answer.
“Work,” he said. “Just someone from work.”
That night I lay awake for hours, listening to Jake breathe. I had been on the verge of confronting him all evening. In a minute, I’m going to do it, I kept thinking. Or if not this minute then the next one. I’d open my mouth, and then the words which were jumbled up in my head, the anger, the tears, the how-could-you?s, would disappear, and my tongue would turn to lead, and I’d sit there silent.
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