I said, “My friend Mel thinks you make your own happiness.”
She shrugged. “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Maybe Ed and Pea could have been happy. But he met me and they weren’t. These things happen. Some relationships last. Some don’t. Who knows why that is. Maybe it’s just luck or circumstance. You can kill yourself analyzing, but . . . nothing is clear-cut.”
She got up and started looking for something in the cupboard above the sink. One half of my brain was still flicking back. Something struck me.
“Why,” I said, “when I bumped into you in Morton High Street, did you say that thing about Jake being boring?”
She turned around. “What thing?”
“You made some reference to Jake being dull. Dullsville, you said. If you’d been seeing Ed, you’d have known that Jake was with me, that he was the father of my children. Why did you say that? It stuck with me. It made a difference. It was a horrible thing to say. Why did you say it?”
Claire smiled, as if amused by some private joke. “Oh, yes,” she said.
“Why?” I insisted.
“Look.” She bit the corner of a nail. “It was cruel, I know. It was a moment of spitefulness. It’s just there you were, with your two lovely children and your fresh-faced outdoors complaisance and your shopping bags full of meals for two. You were the woman who had it all, who had everything I wanted: children, a family to shop for, a house to go back to, a busy little bee making her own happiness as your friend Mel would say, and I just wanted to dent it a bit. See that smug smile slip.”
“Smug?” I said, shaking my head. “I was feeling desperate. I was at the end of my tether. I felt downtrodden and unloved. You were the one who shone. You were the one who looked smug.”
“Yes, well, things always look different from the outside.”
She was grinning at me now, and I found I was grinning back. Ed came back into the room and Claire stretched up to bring down a rusty Quality Street tin from the top of the cupboard. “Chocolate brownie either of you?” she said, “I made them myself.”
When I left the flat, the old men had gone and the small, muddy boys were being shepherded into cars. Pete’s van, along with the Mitsubishi Shogun and its yapping inhabitants, were still there.
I crossed the road and walked a little way across the common to a bench over by the railroad tracks. I sat down. Pete’s phone was in the back pocket of my jeans, so I stood up again to take it out. I placed it in my lap and stared at my feet. I could hear people going by along the path next to me: the rattle and squeals of children on bikes pedaling frantically ahead of their dawdling parents; a dog sniffing my shoes and then off; the parents, plastic bags swinging from reddening hands. But I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on the tufty, turdy grass under the bench, the candy wrappers, the dead matches, the cigarette butts.
There are very few moments in life when you see yourself for what you are. Not how you’d like to be, or how you think other people see you. These moments are very sobering.
I was the only one in our relationship who had been unfaithful, the only transgressor. Everything that had gone wrong in our relationship was my fault. I’d been selfish, self-obsessed, absorbed in my own world. Spoiled. How could I have done what I had done? Jake had done nothing. Or if he had, falling for Claire’s charm to the extent that he’d agreed to act as Pandarus, it was a trifle to what I’d done. To him. To my children, because they weren’t insulated; it was to do with them. How could I have done that? How could I have lost touch with what really mattered? With what was true and good?
I felt a surge of panic rise and stick like vomit in the back of my throat. Had I thrown it all away now? Was I going to lose everything? Would Jake forgive me? What would happen when I told him? Because I would tell him, I had to tell him, how do you live with yourself otherwise? But the thought of the hurt on his face was almost unbearable.
I got up then, brushing away the tears on my face impatiently, and walked back across the common and down the stairs to Pete’s flat.
A strange man answered the door in his boxer shorts. “You must be Lloyd,” I said clearly and firmly, “Is Pete in?”
He paused, then said unconvincingly, “Nnnnno. I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “It’s just his van is there.”
“No honestly, he isn’t.” His eyes widened in indignation.
“Do you mind if I check?” I said, maneuvering past him into the darkness of the flat. “Unlike him not still to be snoozing.” I was sure he’d be in, his van was here, the curtains to his room were still drawn, and it was Saturday morning—where else would a single man be—if not in bed? I had to make sure, because I wanted to get it over with now. While my courage was up. I wanted to be free of it all. I could begin to have my life back. I made for Pete’s bedroom. Lloyd was behind me, making ineffectual noises. I pushed open the door.
“Hey,” he said. “I wouldn’t . . .”
A navy blue velvet shoe with a buckle was dangling from the post at the foot of the bed. An olive green Coach shoulder bag was lying, splayed open, on the floor; its contents, a Harvey Nichols date book, a mobile phone, a pair of tiny pink ballet shoes, a packet of Pampers wipes, were spilling out onto what I could tell from the door was a pair of Boden tartan checked pull-on trousers and what I believed the catalog described as a “lamby half-zip.” Pete was in bed. On top of him, her thick, curly locks not forced back in a hairband, but tumbling down her back in an attitude of sweaty abandon, her broad shoulders not tensed but arched in ecstasy, was someone to whom I had recommended his services and who was, at that very moment, making the most of them. Someone, I was glad to see, who did occasionally let her hair down.
“Oh, hello,” I said. “Walking the dogs?”
Lucinda, hearing a voice, gasped and dove under the covers. Pete sat up quickly, tucking the bedclothes over her head and across his waist as if I was room service bringing breakfast in bed.
Pete said, “It’s not what it looks like,” which made the air escape explosively from the sides of my mouth. He must have thought it was a sob because he leaped out of bed, grabbed a grubby cotton bath robe, and hustled me out of the door and into the hall. “She was feeling unloved,” he wheedled. “She needed affection. I’ve been trying and trying to get hold of you and you’re never in or he is—and then when you answered I kept bottling out and . . .”
“What do you mean, ‘bottling out’?”
“I’d hang up.”
“So it was you. Why?”
He gave a pathetic shrug. “I dunno. Partly, I wanted to see you, but I thought you might have found out about—” He gestured toward the bedroom. “Also, I needed my . . .”
“Your phone.” I reached into my pocket. “Sorry, I’ve taken so long to bring it back.” I held it out. I was whispering now. I didn’t think Lucinda had seen me, and I realized suddenly how much better it would be if she didn’t hear my voice either.
Pete put out his hand to take the phone. But he was already holding something. We both looked at it: a padded tartan hairband.
“Ah,” he said.
“Ah,” I said.
I turned to the door, smiling to myself, but by the time I reached it, Pete had recovered himself and had lunged forward, clinging to my arm like bindweed around a rose. “Maggie,” he spluttered. “Please. I’ll ring you. It’s not what it seems.”
I took in his handsome tanned face and his muscular arms, and the golden legs poking out of his too-short bathrobe. I looked at his mouth, his handsome mouth, the dimples high up on his cheekbones. At the tartan hairband nestling in his golden locks. I said, “Honestly, it doesn’t matter.” I gave him a peck. “I should say thank you, really.” And I turned my back, climbed the steps, and crossed the road to the car.
When I got home, Fergus was dive-bombing Dan in the sitting room. There were Lego bricks all over the floor and plastic cars all over the sofa, and the animals from Dan’s Alphabet Caterpillar h
ad been scattered everywhere. Fergus appeared to have brought his duvet down too, and the television was on—but no one was watching; you could hardly hear it above their squeals. Angela, Jake’s mother, was in the kitchen, talking to my mother, who had popped around so as not to be left out. “We saw a super play at the National last night,” my mother was saying when I walked in. “It was part of the Irish season. Do you get to the theater much? Oh, you don’t?”
Derek was in the garden, studying a drainpipe with Frank, who was standing in the doorway to get a better angle. “Think I might just pop home to get my tools,” he said, backing into the kitchen and stepping on a dump truck. “Oops. Better get something to mend that too.”
And there was Jake in the middle of it all. His dark hair, tousled and pushed back from his face, his feet bare, pale after their summer in the office. He was standing at the oven in an old blue sweater with a saucepan of boiling water in one hand and an open tin of tomatoes in the other, and he was smiling. He had the phone under one ear. “Yes,” he was saying, tipping the shiny tomatoes into a pan of sizzling onions, “Come round. The more the merrier. Maggie’s just walked in. Do you want a word . . . No, no. Come straight round now. Mel,” he said to me, putting the phone down, “she’s bringing Milly to lunch.” He had picked up another pan to drain the pasta but he kissed me over it, a hot, steamy kiss followed by a blast of cold air as he turned to empty the pan into the colander. “Then when we’ve had lunch, I said we’d drive Mum and Dad to the hospital—the nurse said we could take Fran for a walk today, and Mum wants to go to Marble Arch M&S if there’s time before catching the train. They want to take the five-ten if they can. So I’ll take her, shall I, or would you like to? And can you ring Rachel? She wants to know if you put ground almonds in your shortbread.”
Was I going to tell him? Was it the right thing to do? Would it destroy everything we had? “Oh and—” Jake looked over his shoulder at our mothers, now happily discussing the Goya at the Hayward, and said in an undertone, “Christmas. They want to know what’s happening at Christmas.”
“But it’s September!”
“Never too early,” he sang under his breath.
There was crying from the next room. “I’ll go,” I said because Jake was already at the door. And I went through into the sitting room where Dan was sitting, sobbing with a bump on his head, with Fergus, who may well have been the perpetrator but it was too late to tell now, the evidence (probably the remote control), having already bounced off, sitting next to him trying to give him a kiss. “Don’t cry,” he was saying, “Don’t cry.” But Dan didn’t want Fergus’s kisses and was trying to push him off, which made Fergus cry, too, so soon I was having to cuddle them both, trying to fit both on my lap, stroking their soft baby hair, caressing their tears away. “I only wanted to cuddle him. Sorry,” Fergus wailed, and I had to tell him that sometimes sorry was what people wanted and sometimes it wasn’t. And I knew that I wasn’t going to tell Jake about Pete, that not telling him would be my punishment. Maybe it was cowardly, or maybe it was brave. But to tell him would be to seek absolution, to beg forgiveness, and maybe that was the most selfish thing of all. And absolution didn’t come that easy. Maybe absolution could only come by bearing the weight of my mistake myself. It wasn’t a case of kiss and make up. It was a case of carrying it along with me, proving to myself, day after day, that, in the general, unruly, messy, disheveled state of things, it really wouldn’t matter that much.
“Come on,” I said, wiping away the last tears. “Lunch.”
Chapter 25
It wasn’t until several days later that I got around to asking Jake what it was he wanted to ask me that evening after we’d returned from the hospital. We’d put the children to bed and had eaten our supper. In the kitchen with the doors closed: it was getting chilly out there at night now. We were in the sitting room now. Jake was reading the papers, and I was sorting through some photographs. It was something I did from time to time, organize them into piles in preparation for putting them into a book. But I never actually got round to putting them into a book, and in the meantime they’d get all muddled up again—newborn mixed up with second birthday—and I’d have to start all over. It didn’t matter. It was an excuse to flick through our life as much as anything.
I’d just come across a picture of Jake and me on holiday BC (Before Children). We had balanced the camera on a wall, set the timer, and we were crouched down, unnecessarily squashed together, with the Lake District stretching out, in a lopsided way, on either side of us. We weren’t wearing quite enough clothes—we never had serious waterproofs like proper walkers—and our faces were pinched white with cold. But we looked happy, lineless. “Look,” I said. “How young we were.”
Jake looked up from his papers, said “Hmp,” and went back to them.
I carried on staring at the picture. After it was taken, I remembered, we’d decided we’d had enough of scenery and we’d walked down to the car and gone back to the rental house—“A delightful cottage for two,” it had said in the brochure, and we’d referred to it like that all holiday. “Shall we go back to our delightful cottage for two?” And that day, when we’d gotten back we realized we’d run out of firewood and we couldn’t be bothered to go out again, so we’d gone to bed instead. At 4:00 in the afternoon. And we’d stayed there until the next morning, and I remember thinking I had never been happier than that night and would never be happier again.
Jake looked up. I was still staring at the picture and I could feel my eyes pricking. “Are you all right?” he said.
“I’m fine,” I said, slipping it back into a pile of Fergus’s first Christmas. “But what was it you wanted to ask me? The night Fran went into hospital you said there was something.”
Jake froze. He looked down. “Er . . . oh it doesn’t matter. It can wait,” he said.
“No, no. Tell me now. Now will do.”
I curled my legs up on the sofa, leaving the photographs on the floor. I’d had a bath with the children and was wearing Jake’s pajamas and a pair of socks.
“What, now?” he said.
“Yes, now. Why not? Let’s talk about whatever it is now.”
He put the paper down. He ran his hands over his face and then through his hair. They were shaking slightly, his hands, and the corners of his mouth were down. Suddenly, he looked terribly serious. For one thudding, piercing moment, I thought, “he knows.”
I said, “Actually . . .”
He said, “I’ve just been thinking and I know this summer . . . well, things weren’t right . . . and I suspect . . .”
“What?” I said. I was gripping my toes through the socks.
“Well, maybe things would have been different if I . . . if I pulled myself together and . . .”
“What?”
“Well, whether you might like to get married.”
He was grinning at me now. I put my hand to my mouth to stop myself from bursting into tears. I could see it all. A white wedding—a white frock for the bride (skittishly ironic, of course), a black coat for the groom, and all our friends in rows, and glasses raised, crystal catching fragments of light, and dancing, and small children twirled aloft by tipsy uncles, and the maid of honor getting off with the best man and someone’s cousin being sick in the bathroom, and bad speeches, and good ones, and a white pagoda cake, with tiers to shed tears of joy over, and drinking and merriment and, as Mel was always reminding me, lots of presents with my name on them.
And I looked at Jake, sitting there next to me with a crooked smile on his face, the face I knew so well I could trace it in my sleep, and I thought of the children asleep upstairs, and I felt a great thud of joy in my heart. Because this wasn’t an ending or a beginning. It was a continuation. I realized I didn’t need to wait for something to happen. Something was happening all the time. I kissed his face, the rough bits around his chin and then his soft mouth. “Let’s not,” I said, switching off the television and wrapping my holey old tartan robe around him
. “Let’s stick with sin.”
Sabine Durrant is a British journalist best known for “The Sabine Durrant Interview” in the Guardian . She has also worked for the Observer, Independent, Daily Telegraph, and Sunday Times. She lives in London with her partner, Giles Smith, and their two children.
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