“Grow up,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh right, you don’t care if you don’t get any sleep, then?”
“Of course, I care, but come on . . . it’s only a weekend. Anyway,” he added half under his breath, “it’s not as if the children are going to interrupt us having sex.”
It was the first time either of us had referred to the situation between us, as if being with other people made it less dangerous. His words, which sounded almost amused, hung in the air as we took the children out of the car. Then we heard giggles coming up the lane behind us and Mark and Louisa appeared round the corner. I was always taken aback at how handsome they both were. He looked like a male model with a chiseled jaw and rangily muscular body. She was tall and willowy with a large nose and hanks of gingery hair, which she pulled up in a collection of hair clips. On this occasion, some glittery turquoise butterflies, possibly borrowed from her daughter, fluttered above her ears. She was holding Mark’s hand inside one of his pockets. That was the other thing about them: thirteen years of marriage and two children and you could tell they were still at it like rabbits, a suspicion that tended to make the rest of us rather grumpy. “Oh great, you made it!” called Louisa, crunching onto the drive. “Reinforcements!”
“I expect you need them,” I said, bending to kiss her over Dan’s sleeping head. “After a few hours of Pea.”
She looked inquiring.
“I hear she’s had a ‘terrible week’ saving the world.” I mocked Ed’s tone of uxorious concern.
Louisa laughed dubiously. Jake said, “For Christ’s sake, Maggie. Behave.”
He clapped his hand around Mark’s back. He looked visibly relieved to see them. Perhaps because they had rescued him from me.
After I’d settled the children (Fergus rose briefly to the surface of consciousness: “Why am I on the floor?” he asked sleepily. “Ask Pea,” I said, but he’d already gone back off ), I combed my hair and went downstairs to join the others for “a nightcap.”
Mark was leaning back on one of the sofas. Louisa was reclining on a pillow on the floor, resting against his legs. Jake was at a table at the window reading out extracts from the visitor’s book: “‘Disappointing weather for June. Recommend the scampi in the basket at the Pig and Gristle in Appleton’; ‘Wonderfully hot water. And exceptionally soft towels’; ‘Most delightful. Information folder the best we have seen in any rental.’ ” I thought he’d look up when I came in, raise an eyebrow at me, particularly when he got to the bit about information folders, but he kept his eyes on the page.
“Maggie,” said Ed, coming in from the kitchen behind me. “A glass of wine? It’s a rather nice Chateauneuf du Pape. I think you’ll be amused by its immaturity . . . And what about some Boeuf Bourguignon?”
“Goodness, where did that come from?” I said.
“I made it at home and brought it with us in a Tupperware,” Ed said. “I thought people might be hungry.”
Louisa stretched her legs out. “God, you are brilliant, Ed,” she said. “I wish Mark could cook.” She gave him a backward jab with her head. “What a lucky woman Pea is.”
Ed went pink. “I don’t know about that,” he said.
“I should be so lucky,” I sang, going over to an armchair by the fire and throwing myself into it. “I should be so lucky in love.” The others, with the exception of Jake, looked at me oddly. “Sorry,” I said. “Country air.”
There was a lot of talk about the Kyushi pitch then. Ed said, “I knew, I just knew, when they started talking about Claudia Schiffer that we’d got them,” and Mark said, “not to mention when they said we’d hit the nail on the head strategically,” and I realized then, for the first time, what this weekend was all about. It had been planned as a celebration or a commiseration. One I’d let go over my head. I stood up then and said I was going to get a glass of water. Nobody seemed to notice me leave. I went into the kitchen, a small room for a house of this size, and filled a glass from the tap. I drank it with my back against the sink. I felt a pang for Pete. I longed for the feel of his rough hands. It had been a week, and a week in the life of passion is a long time. Just to hear him would be to take me away from all this. He was my escape from the rat race, my escape from the middle classes. I wished I’d managed to ring him before we left. I wished I could hear his voice now. Then I saw Ed’s jacket, flung on the back of a chair, with the pocket hanging down as if it had excess weight inside it. Without moving, I put my foot out and felt it. It was his phone. I could hear the others laughing in the sitting room. “Bang on brief!” I heard Ed yell. I reached across and drew the phone out quickly. It looked pretty easy. I pressed a little red button at the bottom left. The screen flickered and emitted a series of beeps that seemed to echo round the kitchen. A voice from the other room suddenly got louder. I started and thrust the phone back into the jacket just as Ed came into the kitchen.
“Are you feeling all right?” he said, in his little girl voice. “Bit tired?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I turned and clicked on the kettle. “Just making a cup of tea.”
“Oooohh,” he said, a church visitor on an old people’s home visit. “That’s nice.” He picked up another bottle of wine and, with a grimace, opened it between his legs. “I’ll take this through to the non-tea drinkers next door then,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”
I smiled jovially. “I’m fine. I’ll join you all in a minute.”
After he’d gone, I grabbed the phone again, quickly unlatched the back door, and slipped into the garden. The screen had dimmed. Maybe it needed reactivating. I pressed another button, green this time, which said “OK” and a number flashed up, followed by “Call?” It was a moment before it registered. It was the last number the phone had rung. The phone Jake had used only minutes before. Jake had said he was ringing the office. His office was an 0207 number. This number began with 0208. The phone was giving me the option to call it. I quickly looked over my shoulder and then pressed OK again and heard the number dial. It rang three times and then a machine picked it up. I knew who it would be even before I heard her voice. No matter how hardened I thought I’d become, I still felt winded. “Hi,” she began, “you’ve reached Claire Masterson . . .”
I heard a noise behind me. Louisa had come into the kitchen. “Maggie? Where are you?” she cried, poking her head into the garden. “What are you doing out here?”
Panicked, I dropped the phone under some rosemary. “Just getting some air,” I said. “Clearing my head.”
I had to go down later when everyone was asleep to retrieve it. Pete’s cell phone was switched off. Ed’s smelled of lamb chops.
Chapter 19
Saturday. The Old School House. Cotley. Raining.
The day did not start well. It started early. Very early. Dan and Fergus were up with the lark. Didn’t hear the lark. Just heard the rain pounding against the window and the wind rattling the hinges. And Fergus saying, “Is it morning? Is it MORNING?”—and waking Dan up.
I took them down the stairs of the otherwise silent house and into the kitchen where I tried to entertain them with a plastic colander, some metal measuring spoons, and a pack of playing cards I found in a drawer. The cards had naked women on the back, but no one seemed to mind. I tried to make card houses, but every time I had more than two floors balanced, Dan gave them a swipe like a kitten irritated by a fly and they’d fall down and scatter over the flagstones. Fergus would put as many screeched syllables as he could manage without giving himself a sore throat into his disappointment, and then swipe Dan back, a puppy irritated by a kitten.
Ed’s phone was in Ed’s jacket on the kitchen chair where I’d left it. Several times I thought about using it, but I couldn’t see how without Fergus wanting to talk and making a scene when I didn’t let him. It was also painfully early to ring a childless man, not least a childless man who may have been out half the night at Oblivion. I wondered who he’d been with and the thought m
ade me feel jagged with a kind of jealousy that was new to me. It was as if, by sleeping with Pete, I’d opened Pandora’s box and all the dark-sided emotions normally kept at bay by civilized behavior had started buzzing around my ears. I may have looked like a slightly underslept mother playing nicely with her children. But actually I was a witch.
It seemed like five days later when the others began to emerge. First Mark with Penny and Joe, all in their pajamas. And later Pea with Clarice. Pea and Clarice were already dressed. Pea was wearing a pair of neatly pressed linen trousers and a mushroom-colored shirt with tiny pearl buttons. Clarice looked like a summer bridesmaid, in a fitted linen frock the same color as puy lentils.
“Hello Pea,” I said, getting up off the floor. “Lovely linen thing.”
“Agnes B,” she said.
“I meant Clarice’s.”
“That’s what I said. Agnes B.” There was a pause. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, thank you,” I lied. “You?”
She sighed. “Bearably.”
I wanted to say, “Well I didn’t either then,” but Mark nudged me out of the way to get at the cereal bowls.
“Come on, everyone,” he said. “Breakfast.”
He looked up when he’d gotten the kids settled. “It’s raining then,” he said. “Must be August Bank Holiday.”
“Nothing wrong with a bit of rain,” clipped Pea.
“Except we’ll need a plan,” I said. “Mine need to get out of the house.”
“We could still go to the sea,” said Mark. “Wrap everyone up.”
“Or there’s the zoo,” I said. I’d had plenty of time that morning to study the leather folder in the kitchen labeled “Information” (the best information folder in any rental, as we now knew).
“The world’s our oyster,” said Mark.
“The sea, the sea, the sea,” shouted the children. Fergus had already gotten down from the table.
Clarice, who was picking the raisins out of her muesli one by one, said, “I don’t like the sea. It makes me wet.”
“As if you weren’t wet enough already,” I muttered over by the kettle.
The kids were still chanting, so I didn’t think anyone had heard me, but Mark came over to pour himself some coffee and said, “Oooh, back in the drawer, Ms. Sharp.” I giggled, but then I noticed Pea studying me and I felt a bit bad so I hauled the children upstairs and got us all dressed. I didn’t bother to keep them quiet anymore, and when Jake finally rose he looked stormy.
I said, “No need to look at me like that. It’s nine o’clock.” Louisa was coming out of the bathroom. “Everybody happy?’ she said. And then Ed appeared wearing paisley that hung loosely over his thin body. His blond hair was mussed up at the back like a piece of candy floss.
“Morning,” I said. “Almost ready to go out?”
“No, he’s not,” said Jake. “None of us are.”
“Well, I am,” I said. But Ed had already scurried into the bathroom like a guinea pig darting for cover.
Louisa looked at me. “You’re very smart,” she said. “For the country. New clothes?”
“This old thing?” I said, damping down the dress I’d bought after my day at Paddle (my “Claire dress”).
“You’re going to be cold,” she said.
Jake was stony-faced by the time we got to the small seaside town nearby. We’d taken two cars but Louisa came with us, which gave us an opportunity to bitch about Pea (well I bitched with all the twisted humor of my bad blood and she laughed) until Jake, who was driving with a set mouth, said, “Lay off, Maggie,” and I had to make stupid faces at her instead. Then we couldn’t park and had to drive around and around until, finally, we found a lot in a housing estate on the fringes. It was still raining. There was a Texaco on the corner, but otherwise we were miles from anywhere. Miles from the shops. Miles from the beach.
“Oh,” I said, pointedly not undoing my seat belt. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. And we’ve lost the others. It’s just stupid. I’m sure there’s a better place to park.”
“We can’t drive around anymore,” said Jake. “Maybe you should have worn something more sensible. It’s only spitting. What are you? A man or a mouse?”
“A woman,” I said dully, still not moving.
Louisa had disembarked and was putting her raincoat on. Dan was grizzling in the back. Fergus had twigged my mood and was moaning too. “It’s raining. It’s wet. I don’t want to walk. I want to be carried. Carry, carry, carry.”
“Now look what you’ve started,” said Jake.
Louisa yanked open the passenger door. She handed me my jacket from the trunk. “Come on, you lot,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Stop being horrid. It’s the Bank Holiday weekend. Everybody has to be nice.”
“That’s put us in our place,” I said. Jake didn’t say anything. He got out of the car and walked off ahead. I got out and joined Louisa. We followed with Fergus and the stroller.
Louisa was chatting away about this and that, pointing out interesting cottages, telling me about the holiday they’d just had in California and this interesting career move of Mark’s and that swimming badge of Penny’s, and suddenly the monster that was screaming in my head started hammering to get out.
I said, without realizing I was going to, “I’ve met someone else. I’m seeing someone else. A man. Pete.” It was a thrill to say his name out loud.
“You what?” said Louisa.
“A man. I’ve met a man.”
Louisa had stopped walking. Her head was hanging at an odd angle, like one of those dogs that waggles in the back of cars. Her mouth was open.
“A man,” I said.
“What kind of man? What do you mean, you met a man? What are you talking about?”
A car drove past and splattered us. I walked on. She followed. She was still trying to look into my face.
“Watch where you’re going,” I said. “I’ve met a man. I’m having an affair. Or trying to.” I giggled, but she was looking horrified.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “This is awful.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s extraordinary. You should try it sometime.”
I paused to pull Fergus away from some dog shit.
“Are you coming?” yelled Jake, from the top of the road.
I called, “Yes, we are,” and to Louisa I said, “it’s nothing. I’m not really. Forget it. I shouldn’t have told you.”
It’s true: I really shouldn’t have told her. It was just, shameful as it was, I wanted to smash something up for a moment. I wanted to see shock on her face. Even though it belonged to a person I liked. And, after I’d said it, even though I knew I’d opened myself up to danger, that there was a risk to tread around now, I felt relieved. As if I’d taken it one step further. As if I was beginning to make it real.
Jake had seen the others on the other side of the street. They were crossing over to meet us. Clarice and Pea were looking sulky. When they got to us, Pea said, “I’m just going to look round the antique shops. We haven’t got anything waterproof for Clarice, and anyway she doesn’t want to get sand in her shoes. And I’ve seen some rather nice Scandinavian painted furniture in the town square. So we’ll meet you later.”
Ed’s feet were shifting to and fro in his tight Italian leather shoes. “Darling,” he began, but she had already started walking in the opposite direction. “Meet you back at the car in an hour then?” he said in a high, nervous voice. Clarice, who was holding Pea’s hand, turned her head and stuck out her tongue.
When we got to the beach, the children galumphed down to the water and were soon hooting with laughter, playing Russian roulette with the North Sea. Mark and Jake joined them, picking them up one by one, turning them horizontal and pretending to throw them in, like life buoys being hurled overboard. Louisa wandered down too. She said, “Coming?” to me, with a frown, but I shook my head and carried the stroller over the pebbles to join Ed who had sat down on an upturned boat. He
looked glum. It had stopped raining, and there were patches of blue in the sky. There were quite a few people around. Couples trudging up and down, hands in their pockets, and families pretending it was sunny, eating their sandwiches behind wind shelters, children calf-deep in frothing sea.
“Budge up,” I said, putting Dan down so he could watch the waves and pulling my jacket down to protect my bottom from the damp wood. “Good news about Kyushi then.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tight competition too.”
“Yup.”
We were staring ahead. Louisa had reached Mark and put her arms round him from behind. We both watched them for a bit. I said, “They’re the perfect couple, Mark and Louisa, aren’t they?”
Ed shrugged. The dance seemed to have gone out of him. His face looked pouchy and pale. An actor waiting outside make-up.
I said, “Put the rest of us to shame.”
He made an indeterminate noise in his throat.
Louisa had taken off her shoes and was trying to splash Mark with her feet. There were shrieks as Penny and Joe joined in. Jake was showing Fergus how to skim stones.
Ed and I seemed to have nothing to say to each other, which was disconcerting. He was not usually one to let a silence grow beneath his feet. He was playing with some pebbles, shifting them between his fingers and throwing the odd one as if it were a cricket ball onto the sand farther along the slope.
I bent down to rearrange Dan’s blanket. “Your Daddy and I don’t behave like that do we?” I said chirpily.
Suddenly, from behind me, Ed spoke very quickly. “Look, I’m probably speaking out of line here, but I know that you and Jake are going through a bad patch. I know it’s none of my business, but . . .” He swallowed hard. “But I just wanted to tell you that I think he’s a great bloke and that he really cares for you and . . . that’s all really.”
“Ed!” I said, straightening up.
His voice sounded strangled. “Relationships can be very difficult.”
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