by TM Logan
I looked down at her and wondered at the size of the void that had grown between us. Whether it could ever be bridged.
‘Some days are like that,’ I said. ‘You just have to get through them, keep going, and get past them. Some days you just have to be satisfied that nothing bad happened. There are big days and small days, and big days are not always good. But sooner or later you get past them as well.’
‘That’s what my mum thought, too.’
That brought me up short. Mel’s mum Pamela had suffered a psychologically abusive marriage for twenty years but she had stuck it out, month after month, year after year, all the while planning to leave her husband as soon as her daughter reached eighteen and went to university. On the day Mel got her A-level results and a place at Nottingham University, her mum was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She had died barely four months later, never fulfilling her dream of escape.
‘Your mum was . . . that was a tragedy. I can’t imagine what that was like for you. She was so, so unlucky, but she’s not you, Mel.’
‘She waited for her life to get better, she planned for it, but it never did. She ran out of time.’
After the funeral, Mel had found a notebook among her mum’s possessions – lists of all the things that Pamela had planned to do, all the places she would go, once she freed herself from the domineering husband who hated flying, foreigners and ‘funny’ food. But that freedom never came. For years afterwards, Mel said she cried whenever she looked at that notebook. She had only ever shown it to me once; as far as I knew, she still kept it somewhere.
I said: ‘We can be better. I can be better. Things do get better sooner or later, for most people.’
She shook her head.
‘That’s you, it’s not me.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, what does it mean?’
She looked at me for a moment, then dropped her eyes to the floor.
‘How long have you been teaching, Joe? Twelve, Thirteen years?’
‘Thirteen years including my PGCE year.’
‘Three different schools?’
‘Yes. You know that.’
‘And you’re still only deputy head of department. Of a department of four teachers.’
‘So?’ My neck felt hot.
‘So I know teachers our age who are assistant heads. Kate’s a deputy head. Some are even heads already. People who’ve really gone for it, put themselves forward and made the most of their opportunities.’
Trying to keep the anger out of my voice, I said: ‘And you think I haven’t done that?’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It sounds like you do.’
In a small voice she said: ‘Do you think you have, Joe? Honestly? Or have you just been treading water for most of your career? Just let yourself get carried by the current, nice and steady, until you’ve got into a bit of a rut?’
I could feel my cheeks flushing, heat rushing to my face.
‘A rut?’
‘Ever since you stopped playing hockey. Since your injury. You just seemed to give up trying, and settle for being . . .’
‘What?’
She looked away from me.
‘Settle for being what?’ I said again.
‘Average.’
I rounded on her, speaking through gritted teeth.
‘Don’t you put this on me. Don’t you dare. This was your decision, and no one else’s. It was your decision to go to bed with another man, your decision to break our marriage vows. Don’t you dare say it’s my fault.’
I hated her saying that. Mainly because I’d caught myself thinking it too in the last few years, but thought I was the only one who could see it. And I was the only one who was qualified to have an opinion on it.
She looked as if she was starting to regret going down this route.
‘I’m sorry, Joe, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean to say that. It’s my fault. I’m just lashing out in every direction because I know what I did was . . . inexcusable.’
I rubbed my temple with shaking fingers, waiting for the anger to subside. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. What was done was done. I sat down on the windowsill.
‘You should have at least told me,’ I said after a minute. ‘Talked to me about how you felt. Rather than looking for answers in someone else’s bed.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. The truth is . . .’
‘What? What’s the truth?’
She covered her face with her hands, as if she was finally, fully ashamed of what she was about to say.
‘The truth is, ever since William was little I’ve felt so useless with him, like I don’t know what I’m supposed to do half the time. Don’t know what’s expected of me or what a good mother does. More and more it’s like you don’t even really need me, you two boys, you’ve got this bond that I can’t even get close to.’
‘It’s not a competition, Mel. You’re his mother. Every boy needs his mother.’
‘But it seems like sometimes you two would be better off without me. And I hate myself for thinking that.’
‘That’s not true. And even if it was, it’s no excuse for what you did.’
‘I didn’t go looking for it. Things just happened.’
She started crying again.
I was so upset that I could barely see straight. Things just happened. The bedroom felt alien to me and too small for the two of us. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. There had been the team ‘meetings’ that ran on well into the evening. Phone calls at home, quickly ended when I turned my key in the front door. And the email, her Hotmail account, how she always minimised it or switched screens in a hurry when I got close.
She said the naked pictures she sent him had started off as a joke between them when she had taken a picture of him in the hotel room after their first night together as he stood naked at the sink brushing his teeth. She had texted it to him, just for laughs. He had insisted that she send one of herself as well, so they were even. And then it had just become a running joke that he would expect his daily selfie of her.
‘What about the story you told me yesterday, about kissing him at that wedding? Was that all bullshit too? Or did it actually happen?’
‘It happened. And he wouldn’t leave it alone, like I told you. He wanted more but I kept him at bay for a long time. He wouldn’t get the message, he kept going, and going, and going. It was an obsession for him. And then in July we met again at that awards do on Park Lane, and my resistance was worn down, and . . . I already told you what happened that night.’
I felt like I was standing in someone else’s clothes, in someone else’s house, living someone else’s life. This wasn’t me. It wasn’t us.
Think.
‘So the meeting on Thursday at the hotel, that wasn’t you telling him to stop stalking you and pestering you. And it wasn’t about work either.’
‘No.’
‘The story you told me and Beth yesterday, about some programmer at his firm stealing code, that was all lies?’
‘That was made up for her benefit. I couldn’t exactly tell her the truth, could I?’
‘So you had sex with him at that hotel?’
She shook her head.
‘I asked you a question,’ I said. ‘Did you have sex with him on Thursday afternoon?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t believe you. What were you doing there?’
‘Talking.’
‘About what?’
‘About us. He told me he was in love with me like he’d never loved anyone before. That he’d do anything for me, anything I wanted – leave Beth, leave Alice. Sell the company. Sell the house. Move away. Leave everything behind so we could be together.’
Her words were like spikes of ice between my ribs, each one sharper than the last. But I had to keep going, had to get it all out in the open.
>
‘Have you had sex with him in our house?’
‘Yes,’ she said, almost inaudibly.
‘In our bed?’
She nodded.
Our marital bed. It had been our present to ourselves when we moved in. The first time we’d had a decent-sized bedroom big enough for a king-sized bed. As far as I knew it was where William had been conceived.
As far as I knew.
‘Have there been others, before him?’
She looked up at that.
‘No!’ Very definite.
‘You sure about that?’
‘That’s not fair, Joe.’
‘Fair?’ I laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘You’d be in a better position to talk about being fair if you hadn’t just admitted to sleeping with another bloke behind my back.’
She stared at the floor.
‘There’s no one else.’
I turned to a framed picture of William on the dresser. A chubby-cheeked toddler in dungarees and a bib, laughing at the camera with a big piece of birthday cake clutched in his small hand. His mother’s eyes. A horrible, sickening thought lodged like a splinter in my brain. I couldn’t get rid of it, couldn’t push it away.
Should think about getting a DNA test. They’re cheap nowadays. And easy. Just send two samples away in the post and a fortnight later you’ll know, one way or the other.
One way. Or the other.
The thought of it made me want to curl up in a corner and cover my head. I couldn’t deal with that, on top of everything else. A DNA test would provide information that I could never un-know. Once that genie was out there, it would never go back in the bottle. So I would have to decide what I would do with that knowledge if it confirmed this new fear. Because if I wasn’t going to act on it, what was the point of finding out in the first place?
No.
William was my son. Nothing could take that away from me. My boy. Today, tomorrow, forever.
‘I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it, for what that’s worth.’
‘Joe, I’ve been such an idiot. Can you forgive me?’
It wasn’t a question that could be answered. Not in that moment.
‘So many lies, Mel. So many.’
‘I know, I’m so, so sorry. Once I’d started I just couldn’t stop, like I was in a car with no brakes.’
‘Tell me about last night, after you dropped Alice home from babysitting.’
She sighed, wiped her eyes again.
‘I drove back.’
‘You were gone for the best part of two hours. Where did you go?’ I indicated the open cases on the bed. ‘And remember what I said about the suitcases.’
‘I . . .’
‘You what?’
‘Ben had left me some messages. I called him back and talked to him for a bit.’
‘And?’
‘He’s staying at a hotel near Brent Cross.’
‘The Premier Inn from Thursday night? Did you go and see him?’
She shook her head.
‘We just talked.’
‘What about?’
‘Listen, I know it probably doesn’t make any difference now, and there’s no reason for you to believe me.’ She looked me in the eye for the first time since we’d got home. ‘But I want you to know something.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was over between us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I met Ben on Thursday night to end it. For good.’
24
‘Bullshit,’ I said, the word hot in my throat.
‘It’s true.’
‘I told you, no more lies.’
‘I swear to you, on my life.’ She plucked a tissue from a box on the bedside cabinet and blew her nose. A stray thought popped into my head. I used to love the way she blew her nose. I would tease her about it, that she was dainty like a duchess. Like she didn’t want to wake the baby, even before there was a baby. I used to love everything about her. Now the thought just gave me a painful feeling in my chest, for all the things that had been lost between us. Maybe forever.
‘That’s why Ben was so angry when you were talking to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you want to break it off?’ I said, my voice quiet now.
‘I’d been trying to finish it for weeks. I’d already tried two or three times before, but he never got the message. He said we were meant to be together, that we should do what we felt was right and forget anything else. And he’d keep right on texting and emailing me, not leaving it alone, not taking no for an answer.’
‘So basically you got bored with him, too?’
Her face crumpled and I regretted asking the question.
‘The guilt got too much,’ she said. ‘It was like gorging yourself on chocolate cake, and you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t stop. Sooner or later you realise that you have to quit because it’s no way to live your life. It’s fantastic for an hour, or a day, or a week, but you can’t sustain it for a lifetime. Deep down I knew it, even right at the beginning when we first got together. And I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to Beth, or the thought of explaining it to William.’
‘And me?’
‘Or explaining it to you.’ She raised her hands. ‘Either of you, but you most of all.’
‘So what happened on Thursday?’
‘I agreed to meet him, not at his house but a neutral venue instead. A hotel.’
‘And did he get the message this time?’
‘Oh yes. I’m pretty sure he got the message.’
A cold feeling crawled down my spine.
‘Why? What was different this time?’
‘I . . . told him some things. Made some things up, about you and me. I said you’d got suspicious about us, you’d found my phone bill and you were asking all kinds of questions.’
I remembered Ben’s hostility on Thursday evening. His anger.
Mel added: ‘And I said that you’d threatened me.’
‘What?’
‘That you’d threatened to hurt me, beat me up, if I was ever unfaithful.’
Her words landed like a punch to the kidneys.
‘Jesus, Mel, I would never hurt you. Never. I’d jump off a cliff before I did that.’
‘I told Ben we had to end it, because I was afraid of what you might do.’
‘Dread to think how that little bombshell went down.’
‘He . . . wasn’t happy.’
I paused to digest this new information. Things were starting to fall into place.
‘That’s why he got drunk on Thursday night. Because you told him you were calling the whole thing off.’
In a small voice she said: ‘I think so, yes.’
‘And that’s why he went off with one of his guns?’
‘You’ve got to understand, I had to have something to stop it dead, right there, something that would shock Ben into staying away for good.’
‘So you told him some lies about me being an abusive husband.’
‘I made up a story.’
‘But Ben still wanted to carry it on?’ I didn’t want to name it, refer to it as an affair. It made it seem more real, more serious, more final somehow.
My wife nodded.
‘He’s been bored with Beth for years. Whatever spark they had, it went out a long time ago – that’s what he said. He told me that if she hadn’t got pregnant at university they would probably have split up within a few months. But then Alice came along and he felt like he had to do the decent thing. So they got married instead and she gave up her degree to have Alice and look after her. She was going to go back to finish her course, but it never happened for one reason or another.’
It wasn’t something that Beth had ever spoken to me about, but I knew from what Mel had told me previously that they were married young. Beth had dropped out of her degree in the second year. I couldn’t remember what she’d studied, something arty. It was before I’d met Mel but I h
ad seen the wedding photos once: they looked like a couple of teenagers, Beth in a loose-fitting cream dress to disguise her bump, Ben with a crew cut and glasses, looking like an awkward kid who had borrowed his dad’s suit to go to the prom. They were the first people either of us knew to get married, the first to have a baby by a long way. Alice was fourteen now, a smart and focused teenager who had a maturity that belied her age. Beth sometimes joked that she was a daddy’s girl, but in the best possible way – Ben and she had a closeness, an understanding, that was clear to see when they were together. Most of our peers from school and university – all in our mid-thirties – either had young children in nursery or primary school, or had not even got started on babies yet.
I remembered something from the wedding photos.
‘You were her bridesmaid, weren’t you?’
Mel nodded, head bowed.
‘Maid of honour.’
The irony of that seemed particularly black in the circumstances.
‘Did you fancy him, even back then?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Why, of course not?’
‘I just didn’t. It was fifteen years ago.’
‘Because he didn’t have four cars and a six-bedroom house in Hampstead?’ It was a cheap shot but I couldn’t resist it.
‘It wasn’t that.’
‘What was it, then?’
‘Don’t do this to me, Joe. I can’t cope with it. If you want me to go, I’ll go, but don’t torture me.’
‘What about Beth?’
She looked up, suddenly.
‘Oh my God, you’re not going to tell her all this, are you?’
‘I don’t know yet. I don’t think so. But you’re going to tell Ben again. Tell him you’re done, that it’s over. For good.’
She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
She blew her nose again, then took her mobile from her pocket and tapped the touchscreen.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Show me.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Show me.’ I gestured to her phone. ‘The number.’
She terminated the call, started again with the phone held out in front of her so that I could see. I watched as she selected ‘Ben moby’ from her address book, and called the number. She put the phone to her ear again.
