by Julie Cohen
It was only then that she remembered the promise she’d made to Lydia.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lydia
AS SOON AS Mum got home, Lydia ran to Avril’s house. All she could think about was what Granny H had said. How she’d loved without hope or reason. How she’d never found anyone else, for forty-five years. The expression on her face when Lydia had brought down the letters, the way she had touched the envelopes as if they were a person, fragile and immeasurably precious.
They had only read one letter out of the eight, the one with the earliest postmark. It had been written the Christmas after her father had died, and the thing about it was that it sounded so normal. It had news about his family, his three daughters and their children, who were Lydia’s cousins, now that she thought of it. Nothing about it would hint that it was the letter of a father to his son, except for the last line: I think about you often, and hope one day to meet again. And for the way Granny H had looked when Lydia had read it to her: greedy, drinking in every word, tears shining in her eyes.
Lydia ran faster. When she reached Avril’s block of flats, she was out of breath and had to recover for a minute before she pressed the button. Avril appeared almost immediately. ‘Hiya,’ she said, plainly pleased, and for a minute Lydia thought that everything was back to the way it had been last week, before Harry.
‘Want to go for a walk?’ Lydia asked.
‘Yeah, I’ll get my jacket.’
Lydia waited for her outside. She didn’t have her own jacket, and it was a little bit chilly, especially since she’d sweated a bit. She rubbed her hands over her arms and when Avril came down, she gave Lydia her pink hoodie. It smelled of her.
They walked around for a little while, off her estate and across the park. Lydia wasn’t really sure what to say, and the longer she didn’t say anything, the harder it was to start. When she’d been running, she’d had some idea of trying to persuade Avril that Harry wasn’t worth it. But Avril was smiling, like she had a wonderful secret, and there was a bounce in her step.
Jealousy felt awful. It was like burning acid eating away at her insides, destroying every good bit. It made her want to strike out at Avril for being so happy. Except she didn’t want to get into an argument. She didn’t even want to mention Harry, because Avril would be able to tell she was jealous, but she knew that Avril was dying for her to ask about him, so she’d have an excuse to talk about him. She wanted to feel his name in her mouth, like Lydia felt Avril’s name sometimes: the burr of the v on her lips, the kiss of the l on her tongue.
‘How’s your mum?’ Lydia asked finally. ‘Did she go to the parents’ evening?’
It was a mistake. Avril’s face closed up. ‘No. And she’s fine.’
‘Is she out tonight?’
‘She’s working. Why do you keep on bringing her up?’
‘Because … because I care about you?’
‘I told you, I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘All right. But you know, if you do …’
Avril’s phone went and she pulled it out of her pocket immediately, as if she’d been waiting for this very thing. She stopped walking and opened the text, and Lydia heard her sharp intake of air.
‘What?’
‘It’s …’ She giggled. ‘Look.’
She passed over the phone. It was nearly dark outside, and the screen glowed, and Lydia could see before she even took the phone that it was the selfie of Harry’s dick.
‘Really?’ she said.
It was the same one – the same mirror, the same underpants pulled down, the same reflection of the flash in the same spot.
‘God, that is pathetic.’
Avril snatched the phone back. ‘I don’t think it’s pathetic. I think it’s sexy.’
‘Av, don’t you think it’s a little creepy, him sending you pictures of his thing hanging out?’
‘No.’ She started walking again, fast.
‘He’s going to start asking you to send him one, now.’
‘What is it with you?’ Avril said. ‘Why can’t you just be happy that I’ve found a boy I like?’
‘Because you deserve someone better. Harry isn’t serious about you. He can’t be serious about anybody.’
‘And how can you possibly know that?’
‘Because he …’
‘Because he what, Lydia? Because you don’t like him for some reason? Because you do like him, but you blew it, and now he likes me instead?’
‘Because he sent me the same picture that he just sent you.’
Avril stopped. ‘When?’
‘A couple of weeks ago.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t think it was important. I didn’t know then that it was his go-to pic for sending to all the laydeez.’
‘Show me.’
‘I deleted it.’
Avril shook her head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why would I make that up?’
‘Like I said. Because you’re jealous.’
Lydia was so jealous she felt like dying. ‘I’m not jealous. I just don’t think he’s good enough for you. That’s all.’
‘Lydia, everyone wants Harry Carter. Everyone. He’s the fittest boy in the whole school. In what way could he possibly be not good enough for me? Because he wasn’t good enough for you? Or was he only not good enough for you as long as no one else had him?’
‘I don’t think you can trust him.’
‘I can’t trust him? You lied to me!’
‘I didn’t lie, I just—’
‘Either you lied when you got the picture, or you’re lying to me now.’
‘Think about it,’ Lydia said desperately. ‘You don’t know anything about him, not really. And you deserve someone who really loves you. Who you really trust. Can you picture telling Harry about your mum?’
Avril whirled around. ‘I told you I don’t want to talk about my mum!’ she said, yelling it, practically screaming it. ‘I just want to be normal! Just normal, like everyone else, with a real boyfriend and a normal life! Why can’t you let me have that? Why can’t you be happy for me?’
And then she ran off, and Lydia was so shocked that she couldn’t follow her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Honor
HONOR WAS INCANDESCENT with rage. She fumbled under the sink for the bleach and the Cif and the cleaning rags, and found them by feel.
Right here in the kitchen. The heart of a home, the place where Jo fed her children, open to the rest of the house. Honor had heard the voices and the gasps. The panicked shuffle as the lover, whoever he was, scrambled out through the back door before being caught. Her window was open and she heard the whispered conversation afterwards. The laughter. She couldn’t make out all of the words, but it was enough.
How long had it been going on? she wondered. Jo pretending to be the perfect mother, centring everything around her children and her home, even taking in her elderly mother-in-law, while all the time she was leading a double life, snatching stolen moments with her lover?
Honor began by scrubbing the table. It was covered in an oilcloth in a pretty spotted pattern. She hadn’t emerged for breakfast this morning; she wouldn’t have been able to face eating in this kitchen, at least not with Jo in the same room. By feel, she cleaned the entire surface of the table and then started on the work surfaces.
Jo was the type of woman who always needed a man in her life. Honor had known it from the minute she’d met her. She had no career, no interests, no intellectual pursuits. She’d been a waitress, for God’s sake, until she’d found Stephen and become a housewife. She needed a man for her definition, for her direction. A limp noodle of a woman, weak and nice and pleasant and pretty, waiting for a Prince Charming to come along and rescue her. Honor had known hundreds of girls like her. Honor’s parents expected her to be one of them herself, until it became clear that she was not.
Jo was a pretty blank. Too pliable, too easily swayed. Too soft w
ith her children and with the world. It made Honor want to grit her teeth.
That spark the other day – that hint of backbone …
Honor shook her head, rubbing hard with the rag. No, she’d been right about Jo. She’d married Stephen, who was a decent man and who, God help him, loved her, but then when Stephen was gone, she’d married herself to that waste of space Richard, who promptly showed her what kind of man he was. And now she was leaning on another man. She’d move him in soon, or move herself and her children in with him, and the whole story would start again. It always would, with women like her. What sort of role model was she being for Lydia? How was she teaching her daughter to stand on her own two feet?
She felt her way to the sink and rinsed out the rag. The smell of lemon cleanser brought her back to reality. It was a large kitchen; much larger than Honor’s. There were vast plains of surfaces to clean. Jo didn’t appear to have a cleaner, or at least one hadn’t shown up yet. She seemed to take care of everything herself. Most evenings, Honor could hear her scurrying around, catching up on laundry and housework, tidying the toys that seemed to multiply overnight. She had mowed the lawn the other day, first the front and then the back.
‘With a new husband, she could afford a cleaner,’ Honor muttered, making a vicious swipe at the toaster. Her knuckles banged against the metal, and Honor heard her own voice, and she stopped.
Had she really just said aloud that her daughter-in-law was having it off with some strange man in her kitchen, so that she would be able to afford a cleaner? After she, Honor, had herself spent yesterday evening telling her granddaughter about her own affair with a married man? About how she had lost control of herself, thrown herself into something passionate and hopeless, because she couldn’t resist?
Who was she to condemn another woman’s weaknesses or pleasures? At whom was she truly angry?
Honor cleaned the rest of the kitchen methodically, by smell and by feel, and she wrung out the rag and put it into the washing machine. By the time she had finished, she was aching at the hip, and in the shoulders too. She was becoming unfit. Unfit to exercise, unfit to judge.
Her own life had been defined by three men: Shimon, Paul and Stephen. Some feminist she was. Some role model she had been.
In her room, she put on Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major and sat with her eyes closed to appreciate the first movement. Honor followed the thread of the violin’s melody as it twisted and soared to high notes unimaginably sweet, and fluttered back down. She thought of Jo in the kitchen, the whispers and the laughter. She thought of Paul, the last time she had seen him, thirty-five years before he had written that card Lydia had read last night. That afternoon in his home, when she had done the man she loved a terrible wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jo
SHE COULDN’T SEE him again. It was all she could think about that night, lying in the king-sized bed alone, and in the morning, too. After breakfast she took Oscar and Iris for a walk in the opposite direction to Marcus’s house so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stare at it, even though it was a school day and he’d be at work.
She hadn’t promised to see him again. She’d only said she didn’t know.
But she had made a promise to Lydia.
‘Don’t do it again, Mum. Don’t go with some guy just because he’s good-looking and you fancy him, and because you think it might be a good idea, or because you need a man to make you feel better about yourself.’
And the pain in Lydia’s voice; what she was really saying. Don’t betray my father. Again.
Jo pushed Oscar on the roundabout and Iris on the swing and she thought about what Stephen would say. She couldn’t think of anything. If Stephen were here, she wouldn’t have kissed Marcus. Since Stephen wasn’t here, the only way he could have an opinion about it would be if there were such a thing as an afterlife. And Jo didn’t believe in that. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. People lived on through their children and the memories that others had of them. If you did your best in this life, you would be remembered well. She believed in that; that was a rule she could apply to her everyday life.
She knew Stephen had never been the jealous type. She could never picture him condemning anything that made Jo happy. He would have wanted her to move on with her life. But what if that was just the way she wanted to think – the way she’d justified her decision to marry Richard?
Jo gave the roundabout an extra push, to squeals of delight from her children. Kissing Marcus wasn’t a betrayal of Stephen. It was a betrayal of Lydia: of what Lydia had asked of her, of what Lydia needed her to be like as a mother. So she needed to end it with Marcus, if ‘it’ indeed even existed. Although her body was full of electricity, although she still tasted him on her lips, felt his body pressing against her. Even though when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the way he had looked at her.
Even though last night she had lain awake thinking of Marcus’s kiss, instead of Stephen’s scream.
Her phone beeped. It was a text from an unknown number.
I have been very naughty and looked up your number on L’s file. My excuse is that I can’t stop thinking about you. M xx
Her heart leaped and her fingers went slick on the phone. Her hand was shaking as she texted back That IS very naughty and sent it, and then realized that what she should have done was deleted it. And blocked his number. And written him a formal, polite note to say that this was a bad idea, that she wasn’t ready for a relationship of any kind, that she had to focus on her children, but that she hoped they could be friends. And then put the letter in the post instead of putting it through his letter box, because if she went near his house, she would be tempted to knock on the door and beg him to let her in so that she could feel like that for a little while again. Like a woman. Like someone worthy of being seen.
The text came back seconds later. I want to kiss you.
Her children laughed and waved and went round and round. Jo’s heart pounded and her fingers worked by themselves to form the words Me too and send them to where he was, real and solid, less than a mile away, in a classroom or a staffroom thinking about kissing her.
‘Push, Mummy!’
She pushed. There were other mothers in the park: two chatting on a bench, one standing below her toddler on the monkey bars, arms upraised to catch him if he fell. She wondered if any of them had a secret like this.
She started another text. Sorry, it said, I shouldn’t have said that. Marcus, I think this is a bad
Her phone beeped with another message before she could finish.
What else do you want to do with me? he asked.
She nearly staggered with desire. She steadied herself against the back of a nearby bench and glanced around at the other mothers. It was impossible any of them could feel this way, too, split between what they needed to do and what they desperately, desperately wanted.
She wanted to see Marcus naked. She wanted to touch him, taste him all over; learn his body, run her hands over his chest, push him backwards onto a bed and straddle him. She wanted him to look up into her face and see her: not the mother in the park, pushing children round and round and round again, not the housewife with her arms full of laundry and toys – but her. The part of her deep inside who wanted, who was still hungry to find out more, to experience everything.
Jo closed her eyes. She took deep breaths. She wasn’t a reckless person. She had never thrown caution to the wind. She had always, practically from the moment she was born, put her responsibilities first. A sick mother, two husbands, children. Bills to be paid, houses to be cleaned, clothes to be washed, meals to be cooked.
But she was missing something in her life, wasn’t she, something vital, something irresistible? If she could feel this way, right now, in a children’s playpark at half past ten on a Thursday morning in May?
And yet her promise to Lydia.
Another text. On second thoughts, don’t tell me now. Tell me later, when I’m not at school. B
ell’s about to ring and I want to be able to walk down the corridor without embarrassment. M xx
Jo laughed aloud. She pictured him, texting under his desk like a teenager, his glasses slipping down his nose, and laughed again.
‘Why are you happy, Mummy?’ asked Oscar as he went spinning past.
‘I’m just happy,’ she said to him. She put her phone back into her pocket and she pushed her children, faster and faster.
‘Hello? Earth to Joanna?’ Sara waved a hand in front of her face and Jo blinked.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Miles away.’
‘Do you want another coffee?’
She looked at the mess that the four children had made of the café table. But Iris and Polly were colouring, Oscar was demolishing a cake, crumb by crumb, and Billy seemed happy enough with his cars. ‘OK. I’ll get them.’
She checked her phone at the counter, placing the order. She’d never checked her phone so much in her life as she had since this morning. For the first time, she could understand why Lydia never let her phone stray more than five inches from her right hand.
She had deleted her draft text, and then written it again over lunch. Then deleted it. She was not strong enough to delete Marcus’s number. But she hadn’t added it to her address book either.
She had read his text at least two dozen times. What else do you want to do with me?
Nine words. They were all she could think about.
‘So last night,’ Sara said to her, when she got back to the table with the coffees, ‘I put the kids to bed early, and I put on my special lingerie. The stuff I haven’t worn since Polly was born? Actually, I think I was wearing it when Polly was conceived. That’s how long it’s been. And I went downstairs to where Bob was watching the football, just wearing that and this slinky dressing gown I found in the back of the wardrobe. And guess what happened?’
‘What?’ said Jo automatically. She picked up a crayon, handed Oscar a napkin, took a sip of her coffee without tasting it.
