by Julie Cohen
‘I stood in front of Bob and slid the dressing gown off my shoulder, like in some cheesy film. And he actually tilted his head to look around me. He said could I wait a few minutes, the game was going into penalties!’
‘Oh.’
Sara looked outraged. Jo forced herself to remember what Sara had said.
‘Really?’ she tried instead.
‘And the thing was, I wasn’t even that disappointed. I was sort of relieved. I’d made the effort, you know? He couldn’t blame me. I just went upstairs and had an early night.’
‘Sleep is the most important thing, sometimes,’ Jo said.
‘Do you think that’s how it is for everyone? It just peters out, after you’ve had kids?’ Sara looked stricken. ‘Oh wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ask you that.’
‘You mean because of Richard starting up with Tatiana after Iris was born?’
‘It was tactless. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right. It’s crossed my mind. Iris wasn’t a good feeder. I was tired all the time.’
‘Well, that wasn’t your fault. It was no reason to turn to the au pair.’
‘I should have made more of an effort. He’d hired the au pair so we could spend more time together. That’s what he said. But I put the children first.’
‘You’re well shot of him. Can I have one of these?’ Sara took a biscuit from the packet that Jo had opened, but not eaten, and dunked it in her coffee. ‘What about with your first husband, after Lydia was born?’
‘It was … we always made the time.’ Although Lydia was not a good sleeper, and ended up in their bed five nights out of seven. He was working all hours, writing lecture notes, articles. Then there were the black hole days, when Stephen was in the house but not present, lost in his own world of pain.
But sometimes, there was an hour they could snatch on a weekend, when Lydia was napping. Sometimes they fell asleep, limbs entwined, and only woke up when their daughter crawled between them.
If she had known what was going to happen, how little time she had left with Stephen, she would have given up all of her sleep to be with him.
‘It was good,’ she added, feeling the need to defend Stephen. But against what?
‘It must be easier with only one child.’
‘Stephen was wonderful,’ she said. ‘There was never enough time, though. And then he was gone.’
Sara nodded. ‘OK, point taken,’ she said, though Jo hadn’t been trying to make a point. ‘I’ll try again with Bob. Billy, can you not drive your cars through Oscar’s cake, please? Anyway, speaking of which, have you seen the hot neighbour recently?’
Jo’s face flushed. Sara leaned forward. ‘What?’
‘Oh, he …’ is sending me texts saying he is thinking about me, he wants to kiss me ‘… it turns out he is Lydia’s teacher.’
‘No! What a disappointment.’
‘I know.’ She took a hasty drink of her coffee and scalded her mouth. ‘Ow!’
Sara passed her a plastic beaker of water, smeared with child’s fingerprints. ‘I thought he was at the very least a hot gardener.’
‘He’s a Geography teacher. And also Lydia’s tutor. I met him at her parents’ evening.’
‘Damn! Still, at least it must have made parents’ evening more interesting, to have some eye candy to look at. Did you introduce yourself as his incredibly single neighbour?’
‘We … mostly talked about Lydia.’
Why was she lying to Sara about this?
‘I have a great idea,’ she said suddenly. ‘Let’s go lingerie shopping after this. Splash out a little. Buy something that makes us feel pretty.’
Sara laughed. ‘With this lot? I don’t feel like spending the next two hours untangling Billy from bras, thank you.’
‘Right. Yeah. Good point.’
Secretly, she touched her phone in her pocket.
That night, after the children were in bed, when Lydia was revising in her room and Honor was listening to music in hers, Jo stood at her kitchen window looking out. His light was on, as he’d promised. The outdoor light, and a light in the top window of his house, which might be his bedroom. She watched the strip of light between the curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Hoping to catch him looking out at her.
God, she was obsessed. It had been a little less than twenty-four hours, and she’d thought of nothing but Marcus, what he was doing, whether he was thinking of her. She had deceived her friend Sara. She had still not yet sent the text ending it. She knew, to the minute, how long ago he had been in this kitchen with her.
She made herself turn away from the window and finish making the cup of tea she’d started. It was going cold already. She brought it upstairs, along with her phone. She was alone now. She’d be able to think straight. She could delete his messages, send him something cool yet friendly, and get on with her life.
The master bedroom was much too big for one person, with a king-sized bed, walk-in wardrobes that gaped half-empty. The furniture was new and one side of the bed hardly used. Jo had tried sleeping in the middle, tried sprawling out, but she always ended up on the right-hand side. She was used to taking up little space. After Richard had left she’d bought some flowered scatter cushions, with the half-formed idea of making the room seem more feminine, more hers. They didn’t do much.
Sometimes she stayed up later than she should, doing housework, so that she would not have to come up to this room alone.
Her phone beeped as soon as she sat on the bed.
Safe now. Are the kids in bed? Did you have a good day? M xx
Her bedroom was above the kitchen. She went to the window, opened it. From this vantage point she could see the end of his bed. A blue duvet cover. Nothing else.
This has to stop, she texted, and deleted.
I promised Lydia
I hardly know you
You’re young enough to
She held the button down, watching the words disappearing letter by letter. Jo swallowed, and spelled out the truth instead.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you either, she wrote, and held her breath as she sent it off.
It didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt … it felt the same way as she had felt in that café in Cambridge, when Stephen had put down his books and seen her for the first time.
No, not the same way. It couldn’t be the same way. But she was breathless, heart pounding, stomach full of fire, feet hardly tethered to the floor. Alone in her bedroom with her children asleep in the house and she wanted to dance.
It was physical. The physical symptoms of desire. It was a temporary thing, a crush, just a part of what she had felt for Stephen, but it was more powerful than she remembered. Maybe you couldn’t remember something this intense, this all-encompassing, once it was gone; not in all its details. Maybe once you’d had it, like she’d had it with Stephen, it left a hole inside you and most of the time you didn’t even notice something was missing, until suddenly, one day, you found someone who filled it, and you knew that you couldn’t bear to be without it again.
It was more powerful than almost anything, except the pull she felt towards her own children when she held them. And even that was different. Calmer, softer, wider. Not as hungry, not as greedy or focused.
Tell me what you were thinking, texted Marcus. Tell me what you want to do.
Fully clothed, she slipped underneath the bedclothes. She pulled them over her head, so she was hidden, surrounded, in a warm pocket of secret air. Not seen, not heard by anyone, except for this invisible current from her phone, bounced up into space, bounced down to him. Travelling thousands of miles to travel a few metres. She licked her lips.
First, I’d unbutton your shirt, she began.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lydia
‘I DON’T WANT to fall out over a boy,’ said Avril, when she came by to pick up Lydia on her way to school. Lydia had been watching for her out of the window, pretending to listen to music on her headphones.
>
‘I don’t want to either,’ said Lydia.
‘Good. But you can’t lie to me. You can’t. It does my head in, thinking that you could be hiding something from me. We’re supposed to be best friends.’
‘I wasn’t ly—’
‘Just promise not to do it, OK? Promise to always tell me the truth.’
Lydia nodded. ‘I promise,’ she lied.
‘Sometimes I wonder if you receive these cards, since you haven’t answered in so long. I suppose I can’t blame you for keeping me at a distance. I’m a stranger, after all, married to a woman who’s not your mother. I’m writing these cards for myself as much as for you – kidding myself that if I keep a channel of communication open, maybe one day you’ll answer me. You must have given me your address for a reason, mustn’t you?’
Lydia lowered the card. It was the third one she’d read; the other five sat, unopened, on Granny Honor’s bed.
‘What does he mean, he’s a stranger? Didn’t Dad spend any time with him at all?’
‘To my knowledge, they only met once.’
‘But why? Didn’t he want to know anything about his son?’
‘Until they met, Paul did not know he had a son. I never told him.’
Lydia stared at her grandmother. Her face was placid, as if she hadn’t admitted something so unbelievable.
‘You never told him you were pregnant? I thought …’
Granny Honor raised her chin. ‘You thought I would place an obligation on a man who had no intention of leaving his family? I had far too much pride for that. And I had no desire to be second-best in Paul’s life. That was a torture I chose not to endure.’
Lydia thought of the promise she had made to Avril this morning. ‘But you lied to Dad.’
‘I did not lie. I omitted. We never spoke of his father.’
‘But didn’t he ever ask?’
‘When he asked, I told him that his father was not part of our lives.’
How did you criticize your own grandmother for what she’d done when your father was growing up? Lydia studied Granny Honor: the patrician nose, the stubborn chin, the steady brown eyes. She had always been a little bit scared of Granny Honor. She always felt stupid next to her. But this …
‘I …’ She swallowed and thought about how to say it. ‘I would’ve been really sad not to know about my father growing up.’
‘You think it was a mistake. You think I did wrong, not to tell either of them.’
‘Well …’
‘Your father felt that way too.’
Honor said it softly, and she looked down at her lap as she said it.
‘It was a few months before he died that Stephen came to me,’ she continued. ‘He told me that he had met a man, a fellow academic, at a dinner. The man had stared at him all evening. He had seemed troubled. After the dinner, he approached Stephen and asked him his mother’s name.
‘He had worked out that Stephen was his,’ Honor said. ‘You see, Stephen and Paul looked very similar. To Paul, it may have been like seeing his younger self at the table with him.’
‘What was it like for Dad?’ Lydia asked.
‘Your father … was very angry with me. He and I argued. It was one of the only times …’ Honor lifted her chin again. ‘I have thought of it often. Especially as Stephen died not long afterwards. I have come to think that I made a mistake. And there is nothing I can do to make it up to your father. He died with that between us.’
Granny Honor was in the armchair; Lydia was sitting on the bed, next to the unopened letters. Honor’s posture was the same as it had been: proud, defiant, fierce. But something glittered in her eyes. It might be unshed tears. If they were sitting together on the sofa, Lydia might have reached out to her grandmother and hugged her. But there was a space between them. And something about Granny Honor’s posture forbade her from crossing it.
‘Do you think Dad ever wrote back to him?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. He may have, before he died.’
‘I hate to think of Paul writing, and writing, and not knowing that Dad is dead. Maybe we should write back to him,’ Lydia said. ‘There’s a return address on the back of the envelope.’
‘No,’ said Honor quickly.
‘But he would probably want to know that Daddy is—’
‘What difference can it possibly make?’
Lydia frowned. She thought it would make quite a bit of difference, personally, but Granny Honor seemed so dead set against it that she didn’t pursue it.
‘Paul wrote to me, too,’ said Granny Honor, softly again. ‘It was about the same time that Stephen and I argued. It must have been because he’d seen Stephen.’
‘Don’t you know why? Didn’t he say in the letter?’
‘I burned the letter as soon as I received it.’
Lydia couldn’t imagine ever receiving something from Avril and burning it. She couldn’t even leave a text unanswered for long. ‘Why?’
‘That chapter in my life was over.’
‘But he might have been writing to tell you that he’d got a divorce. Or that his wife was dead.’
‘Neither of which was true, according to the letters we’re reading now,’ snapped Honor. ‘It was finished. We have to live with the choices we make, Lydia. Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.’
She stood and walked, in that shuffling way she had now, to the window. Lydia could tell when she was being dismissed. She stood too, and hesitated, looking at her grandmother’s narrow back. Wondering if she should go to her and touch her shoulder. Hug her and say that she loved her anyway, even if she had kept that secret from Dad.
But Granny Honor wasn’t acting as if she wanted forgiveness. And anyway, what good would Lydia’s forgiveness do? Lydia had only been a little girl when all of this had happened.
She put the letter on the bed next to the others and went upstairs to her new room.
Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.
God, Granny Honor had lived a whole lifetime alone. She’d chosen to be by herself because she couldn’t stand to hope. She’d cut herself off from the man she loved, and cut her son off, too, because she thought the pain would be less that way. Because she only wanted the man she loved if she could have him fully.
Was that what was going to happen to Lydia too?
She lay down on her bed. It was funny, but when her bedroom had been downstairs she’d been driven crazy by all the noise. But up here, she could hear nothing at all. It was almost as if she were totally alone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Honor
Oxford, 1969
HONOR HAS NEVER been to Paul’s house before. He invites her whenever he invites the rest of the department, for drinks or the end-of-term barbecue, but she always makes her excuses. Even before they were lovers, she hasn’t wanted to see his house and the way he lives. But today is different. Today she is different.
Now, she stands on the doorstep, holding a bottle of wine. His house is a 1930s semi-detached in Headington, surrounded by similar houses. The stucco is painted white and the door is painted pillar-box red. It’s not at all the kind of house she’s imagined him in.
She hears voices through the door before it’s opened by a blonde woman wearing a yellow trouser suit. She looks utterly ordinary.
His wife.
‘Hello,’ she says, smiling. ‘You must be Honor. You’re a bit early – no one else has arrived yet. You can help me put things on skewers, if you don’t mind.’
‘That will be fine,’ says Honor automatically. She steps into Paul’s house, her lover’s house. Wellies and plimsolls are piled up by the door. A collection of macs hangs from pegs.
‘Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you a drink. Oh, my name’s Wendy, by the way.’
‘I know,’ says Honor. ‘It’s nice to meet you at last.’
She follows Wendy through carpeted rooms. There are bookshelves, wallpaper, chintz sofas, striped curtains. Flowers in vases, as
htrays on tables. A paperback novel lies open on a chair. A rag doll’s feet protrude from underneath a sofa. A model of a Spitfire half-completed on a side table. The house smells of coffee and flowers and tobacco, a scent that Honor recognizes from Paul’s clothes.
This could be anyone’s house. Anyone’s at all.
The kitchen is white and yellow, like Wendy. Children’s drawings are Sellotaped to the cabinets. ‘I’ve started on the gin already,’ Wendy admits, giving Honor a perfectly ordinary smile. ‘I need a cushion to get through these events. Everyone’s so clever and there are so many politics, you feel you’re on the verge of saying the wrong thing all the time. Can I pour you one?’
‘No, thank you,’ says Honor. ‘Water will be fine.’
Wendy is petite, with a tidy figure and hair tied back into a ponytail. She wears hooped earrings. Wendy fills a glass from the tap and hands it to Honor, and Honor looks at the gold and diamond engagement ring that Wendy is wearing. The ring he chose. He gave it to her and asked her to marry him.
It is a perfectly ordinary ring.
‘I’ve heard so much about you from Paul,’ says Wendy. ‘He says you’re absolutely brilliant, one of the finest minds he’s ever encountered. I’ve never heard such praise from him.’
Is there a meaning underneath what she’s said? Honor searches Wendy’s face, but can’t find it. But then she doesn’t know Wendy, for all her ordinariness. Wendy could mean anything.
‘It’s very nice of him,’ says Honor. ‘Paul is the brilliant one, of course. Is he in?’
‘He’s nipped out with the children to pick up some more food for the barbecue. Well, he’s taken two of them – the littlest is upstairs with a cold. They always seem to pick up a bug when you’ve got plans or you’re entertaining, don’t they? Do you have children?’
‘No,’ says Honor.
That morning the doctor confirmed the test results. Ten weeks pregnant, nearly through the first trimester already. ‘At thirty-five, you’re a bit old to be having a first baby, Miss Levinson,’ he said, and Honor had not corrected the title. ‘You’re what we call an elderly primigravida. But you’re healthy as a horse, so I shouldn’t worry.’
