Not That Kind of Girl

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘This is no place for you, Henny. You shouldn’t be here.’

  But he’d been trying to tell me something: to get to my father’s bedside. And again, I’d read him wrongly. Had felt only guilt, shame and inadequacy in the face of what I’d believed was his moral superiority.

  And then later, of course, Andrew would have told Mum that he’d seen me in the flat. Hopefully sparing my blushes – and hers too – by glossing over my flagrantly undressed state, but nonetheless outlining the situation. And that must be why she wanted to speak to me now. She’d presumably guessed where I was.

  I gazed out through dark window panes into the garden I knew so well, the one we shared with the neighbours; it was illuminated slightly now by the light from Mrs Spira’s ground-floor flat. The heavy branches of the yew tree spread out like skirts over damp grass, whilst glossy laurels and rhododendrons crowded the edge. Yes, she’d got me here to advise me against it. To tell me I was playing with fire, remind me of my responsibilities. I remembered her tone in the Nursing Home when she first heard Marcus and I had separated. ‘Get straight home now, my love. Mend those fences.’ Except – she didn’t know they were beyond repair. Irredeemably broken. I turned and folded my arms tightly. Looked her in the eye.

  ‘Rupert and I are adults, Mum. We’re out of your jurisdiction. I know you mean well but we were once very much in love, and now we’ve found each other again. This is not a flash in the pan, some grubby affair to feel ashamed of; this is something we both feel very strongly about. It’s a rekindling of something that was once very real, and still is. Something neither of us will deny this time around.’ I raised my chin.

  ‘I’m not questioning your strength of feeling, Henny, or your commitment to Rupert. I never did. I’m questioning his.’

  I blinked, wrong-footed. ‘What d’you mean, you’re questioning his?’

  Andrew looked up from the bottom of his whisky glass. His pale blue eyes regarded me gently, but squarely.

  ‘He’s married, Henny,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I felt the world, as I knew it, tilt beneath me. My stomach lurched and I began to breathe very fast. I stared at Andrew’s narrow, fine-boned face, so redolent of Rupert’s, with those blue eyes above high cheekbones. Blue eyes steady and true.

  ‘Married?’ I breathed. Even as I said it, the idea became preposterous. ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ I burst out. ‘He can’t be!’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘But – he can’t be! He’d have told me!’

  ‘Would he?’

  I stared at him, horrified, brought up short. Suddenly I couldn’t look at those penetrating eyes any longer. I turned sharply and went to the window once again. My mind was racing like a speeded-up film, my heart pumping as I gazed out at the dark night. A thick fog was settling over the spreading yew tree now: I could smell it seeping across the damp North London garden.

  ‘He can’t be,’ I said again, but softer, with less conviction this time. There was no answer from Andrew behind me. Worse than a contradiction almost. But …I struggled. How? How could he be? He lived in Albany, for heaven’s sake, and there was no sign of a wife there. No evidence of a female presence, no pretty cushions, old lipstick ends in the bathroom. Or did he live there? Did he perhaps live elsewhere, and that was the London pad? The very much man-about-town pad, to be used – as far as she was concerned – only in emergencies, in extremis … Jesus. Married.

  I turned. ‘Children?’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three!’ I nearly choked.

  He nodded. I licked my lips, trying desperately to assimilate this new information, my eyes roaming wildly about the room as I wrestled to comprehend. Rupert. A father of three.

  ‘How – how long has he been married?’ It was my voice, but it didn’t sound like mine. It was high and shrill, as if someone was squeezing my throat from below.

  ‘Five – maybe six years.’

  I saw my mother watching me, her face anxious, distressed: her hands clenching and unclenching. I moved across to the bookcase at the side of the room, holding on to a shelf with my fingertips to steady myself, gazing at the spines. It was the overflow from Dad’s study when he ran out of room in there. The books looked dusty through lack of use.

  Six years. With three children. Which meant three under the age of five. One of just school age, then a toddler, and then a baby. Hard work. Very hard work. For Rupert’s wife. I breathed in sharply, hearing the quick suck of air through my lips, still getting used to the idea, still assimilating the information. Trying to imagine it. Where was she, I wondered. In London? No. No, probably not. Not if Rupert was conducting another life here. She must be up in Hereford, on an Army base. A friend at school had lived on one – modern houses in a friendly cul-de-sac, semis for squaddies, detached for officers, with a patch of green at the front and swings at the back. There wasn’t a lot of money in the military, and inside, they were basic, functional. I saw her now, on a Sunday night, struggling with bathtime. A fractious baby, desperate for a bottle, in her arms as she knelt on the bathroom floor, two toddlers stamping in the bath, shrieking with glee, the water going in their eyes and the laughter turning to tears as she struggled to placate them, her arms already full of squirming baby.

  I remembered those years. The tedium, the frustration, the exhaustion, the rattiness, the lack of stimulation, the burning desire to talk to anyone over the age of five. And Marcus had been so good about coming home early, giving a hand with bathtime, reading stories. And where was her husband? What had he told her? ‘Sorry, darling, I’m still in Basra,’ or Fallujah, or some other sensitive, war-torn somewhere, on a highly dangerous important mission, naturally. And naturally it would take precedence over three small children and a wet bathroom floor. And all the time, all the time, he was cooking fillet steaks in his cashmere pullover, for me, his mistress. Nipping out to the offy for some claret, for his floozie. Who was also married. I swallowed. Regarded the leather spines with their gold embossed lettering before me. Did that make a difference, I wondered? Make it better? I turned.

  ‘So he’s married,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Well, I’m married too,’ I countered.

  ‘You are,’ Mum agreed.

  ‘And – and sometimes – well, sometimes marriages don’t work out. Not all marriages are made in heaven, you know. And anyway, people only go looking for someone else if they’re unhappy.’

  Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I hadn’t been unhappy with Marcus. I’d been bored at times, but not with him. Just with my empty nest. With my monied, stockbroker-belt life, where my housework was done for me and I tried hard to fill my days. I’d wanted to spice it up a bit. Well, I’d certainly done that.

  ‘And sometimes marriages need to be worked at,’ said Mum quietly. ‘Need to be fought for. Many are worth fighting for. But of course, it’s much easier to throw in the towel.’

  ‘Or perhaps not even bother to throw in the towel,’ put in Andrew. ‘To run two lives at the same time.’

  Like Rupert, he meant. Rupert, running two women, two houses, two lives. Why hadn’t he told me? He must have known I’d find out. And after all, I had a marriage, for heaven’s sake – children, a home – why not tell me about his? Why hide it? Lie? I thought of her tucking her children in at night. Desperate for a drink as she went downstairs, for that magical, white-wine reward when she’d finally got them all down.

  ‘What’s her name?’ I said to the dark window.

  ‘Sinead.’

  ‘Sinead?’ I turned. ‘That’s Irish, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, she is Irish. Lives in Ireland.’

  My mind spun. ‘So – so that little cottage, the one in the photo on Rupert’s dresser, is that their home? Where they live?’

  ‘That, I believe,’ Andrew picked his words carefully, ‘is Rupert’s holiday cottage. A very basic little place near Dundalk, on a river. A retreat.’

  ‘Rupert’s cottage? Not thei
rs? And – you believe? Why don’t you know?’ I gazed at him. He didn’t answer. I looked at Mum. She glanced down at her hands.

  I licked my lips. ‘Andrew, what’s going on here? Have you met Sinead? Been to their house?’

  He gave himself a moment. ‘Yes,’ he replied eventually. ‘Yes to both those questions. But only once.’

  ‘Only once!’ I was staggered. ‘But, hang on – they’ve been married for six years!’

  He struggled for the right words. ‘Henny, Rupert’s very private, as you know.’

  ‘Is he?’ I flushed angrily. ‘No, I didn’t know that. He was never private, or secretive, with me!’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘He wasn’t. And when he brought you home that first time, when you stayed the night after the ball – well, you could have knocked me for six. I nearly fell off the chair at the breakfast-table. You were the first girlfriend he’d ever brought back, unlike Peter who’d had them traipsing in and out since he was sixteen. And the last.’

  ‘The last? You mean …’

  ‘The next one I met was already his wife. Sinead. He got married without my knowledge. Without telling anyone, in fact. To a girl he’d known for some time, apparently. But there was no big wedding. No ceremony. They just quietly went ahead with it one day in Dundalk. Even Peter didn’t know.’

  ‘Good heavens.’ I sat down abruptly on the arm of a chair. ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘He leads an extraordinary kind of life, Henny. The nature of his work dictates a degree of secrecy, of privacy.’

  ‘Well a degree, yes – but surely other SAS officers lead relatively normal family lives? Just don’t blab too much when they come home. Presumably they still mow the lawn though, go to the pub, have Sunday lunch …’ Unlike Rupert, I thought suddenly, whose whole life, it seemed, was shrouded in mystery. And shrouded from me, too.

  My gaze skimmed the top of Andrew’s head for a moment, then I found his eyes. ‘He wasn’t going to tell me, was he? I mean, at all?’

  Andrew made a hopeless, embarrassed face. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘And – and yet, he appeared to want to commit to me, Andrew. I mean, in a deadly serious, permanent way that I couldn’t even begin to contemplate. That I felt was far too scary, too over the top.’ It was true, I’d repeatedly shied away and pushed it to the back of my mind, but in Rupert’s eyes – oh no. This relationship was utterly serious.

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt that for one minute,’ said Andrew vehemently. It was the first thing he’d said with any real conviction since we’d started this conversation. ‘I don’t doubt that at all. He wanted you very much.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ How could he? I wanted to say. How could he have me, and still have another life in Ireland? With Sinead? Was he going to have his cake and eat it? Except …no. That didn’t ring true either. My head was spinning.

  ‘And you, Henny?’ said Mum, coming forward and sitting on the opposite arm of the chair, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Are you deadly serious? How do you feel now you know he’s married?’

  I got up and turned back to the window. ‘The same,’ I wanted to say. ‘This hasn’t changed a thing. Not a thing.’ But it had. It had changed everything. I stared out. The fog had turned to rain now; that fine, insidious rain that drenches everything, quietly and stealthily. I gazed down at the sodden black grass and wondered when he’d been planning on going home. When he’d been planning on walking through the door in Dundalk, scooping up the four-year-old running excitedly towards him –

  ‘Daddy!’

  Kissing his tired wife as she came down the hall to meet him, a baby in her arms, a toddler clutching her skirt, a weary smile. ‘Good trip?’

  Oh no, it changed everything.

  ‘And she, I take it, is unaware of me?’ I swung back to Andrew. ‘Unaware of my existence?’

  ‘Oh no, she’s very aware of you. Has been for years.’

  I stared at him. ‘What d’you mean? How d’you know?’

  ‘Because I’ve talked to her. When I say I’ve only met her once, it’s true. But that once was last weekend, for the first time. I went to Ireland to see her, at Peter’s insistence. I had a long telephone conversation with him and he persuaded me to go. He’s been convinced for years that Rupert had some sort of other life going on, but he’s too far-flung in Australia to do anything about it. But he said if there were children involved, which he was convinced there were, then I, as their grandfather, should find out. So I went.’

  ‘But where? How did you know where to go? And why Ireland?’

  ‘Laurie tipped me off.’

  ‘Laurie?’

  ‘Yes, Laurence De Havilland, your employer,’ he said patiently.

  I shot my fingers up through my hair, bewildered now. ‘Hang on – why would Laurie know?’

  ‘Because he served with Rupert in Northern Ireland, years ago. They did a tour of Armagh together. Towards the end of it, Rupert joined the Special Forces and worked undercover in Dublin, but even though he’d left the Regiment they still came across each other militarily. And I know Laurie through the Brigade, you see. See him at regimental dinners, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And …he knew about this? About Rupert’s other life out there? How come?’

  ‘A few years back, there was a bit of a scandal. Laurie had left the Army but had gone back to Armagh to see some of his mates who were still serving there. You know, the big hot-shot TV presenter drinking in the Mess with his old Army buddies, good PR. Anyway, while he was there, he got a local girl pregnant. She came over here to have an abortion, and because of who he was, it got into the papers. It was nothing very much, just a few lines on page nine of the Daily Mail – “History man in paternity scare”, or something, but in the report, it said that Donna O’Sullivan left the abortion clinic in London with her brother-in-law. The picture was of her and Rupert.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Exactly. Oh. Peter was over from Australia at the time, and he spotted it. Pointed it out to me. We rang Rupert in Ireland who laughed. Completely poo-pooed it. Said – how ridiculous, the paper had got it wrong. He had darted over from Ireland and met the girl at the clinic, but as a favour to her brother, who was working with him in Dublin. Friend of the brother, he maintained, not brother-in-law. Honestly, these hacks.’

  ‘But it was, in fact …’

  ‘Sinead’s sister who Laurie had got up the spout.’

  I remembered Rupert’s scathing condemnation of Laurie. No morals, no sense of responsibility. Leaves his mess for other people to clear up. But it was a mess slightly closer to home.

  ‘Right. So Rupert’s rumbled …’

  ‘But laughs it off. But for ages it’s rankled and I’ve wondered. And then the other day, after I saw you in the flat, I got to thinking. Thinking that if my son did have a life I didn’t know about in Ireland, then you probably didn’t know about it either. And that maybe you should. Maybe we should all know. And maybe I should take my head out of the sand and find out what was going on before a bloody great can of worms erupted.’

  ‘So you rang Laurie.’

  ‘Exactly. I rang Laurie, who was loth to tell me initially, but eventually confirmed my worst fears. He said that the girl he’d got pregnant did have a sister, and that the sister lived in a tiny community on a remote part of the east coast. She had small children, and lived close to Dundalk – in Dromiskin, in fact. The same village as Rupert.’

  ‘Right.’ My breathing was getting shallower. ‘So you went out there.’

  ‘Two days ago, I went out there. I found the village, and then I went to the pub. I showed the barman a picture of Rupert. Asked where his wife lived. It didn’t take long.’

  ‘And it’s true.’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s true. She’s his wife all right.’

  ‘But – why keep it a secret? Why not bring her home to England, or – or live openly with her in Ireland? Does he live with her?’

  ‘A bit, apparently. But not much. He visits.’<
br />
  ‘He visits!’ I yelped. ‘Why?’

  Andrew shrugged in a despairing gesture, palms up, fingers splayed. ‘I don’t know yet, Henny. I’m still new to the situation. There’s so much I still don’t know, so much that’s between Rupert and Sinead, but I have my theories, of course I do.’

  I got up and turned back to the window. Watched as the rain, heavier now, splattered against the dark pane, beating out a tattoo. Suddenly I didn’t want to know his theories. Didn’t want the explanation. An owl screeched high up in the yew tree then flew off into the night. I exhaled onto the glass and as condensation formed, rested my forehead on the window. Down below me, in the first-floor flat, a child cried out, then there was the muffled sound of a mother, quietening it. Must be Howard Greenburg’s daughter-inlaw, I thought. Brought the grandchildren for a visit. The child persisted.

  ‘But I want it now!’

  And then suddenly, I realized that the voices were much more proximate. Not down below at all. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck as I lifted my head off the glass and listened. They were too clear to be coming from Howard’s flat; they were here, in this flat. The child called out again. The sounds were coming from the bedroom at the far end of the corridor. I spun around.

  ‘Who’s here?’

  Mum got up and came towards me, her hands outstretched in a desperate, soothing gesture, her eyes huge and troubled.

  ‘Oh darling, we weren’t going to do this, Andrew and I, we agreed.’ Her eyes darted anxiously down the corridor. ‘Agreed it was too much for you to take in all at once, and they were tired, anyway, they were going to sleep. Sinead agreed, we talked to her about it.’