So what now? she wondered. Now that the stupid marriage was up in smoke, would Ben come running back to her like he always did? And would she take him back? She smiled slightly. If and when he came running, she’d be the one holding all the cards. And this time she’d play them to her advantage.
Ben hadn’t been at an evening football practice since before Christmas. He pulled the Herbal Matters van into the car park near the training grounds and walked out onto the pitch.
“Yo! Ben!” Phil sauntered over and banged his pal on the shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting to see you for another couple of weeks. I didn’t think you’d be let out for footie practice so soon.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Ben shortly.
“Sorry for opening my mouth.” Phil looked at his friend in surprise. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” said Ben.
“Suit yourself, mate.” Phil picked up a football and began bouncing it on his knee.
“Quit messing.” Ben took the ball mid-bounce. “I want to stretch my legs.” He dribbled the ball down the pitch, Phil in hot pursuit. Ben approached the open goal and steadied himself just as Phil caught up with him and tapped him on the ankles, causing his shot to drift past the post.
“What a player!” cried Phil. “A crucial tackle at a crucial moment of the game.”
“Oh, piss off,” said Ben. “It was a foul.”
“Rubbish.”
“A foul,” Ben repeated. He retrieved the ball and placed it on the penalty spot. Then he kicked it low and hard into the back of the net.
“And he scores!” Phil laughed. “Deadly from six inches, as my old man used to say.” He grinned at Ben. “Or does the new Mrs. Russell disagree?”
“Who knows?” said Ben.
“What d’you mean?”
Ben hesitated for a moment, then glanced back down the pitch to where the other footballers were waiting. “They’re picking the teams.” He tucked the ball under his arm and jogged towards the other players. Phil frowned as he followed him.
Carey sat in the bedroom and looked at the walls. The paper was alive with cartoon characters dancing and jumping and cartwheeling — it made her feel tired just looking at it. But she was in the bedroom that had once belonged to Peter’s son, Aaron, and she couldn’t expect that a two-year-old’s walls would be papered in gentle pastel shades or that there wouldn’t be crayon marks on the window sill and mysterious stains on the bright yellow carpet.
It was quiet in the house. Today was her day off and she was already exhausted. She’d woken far too early that morning, pitching into wakefulness as she had every day since she’d moved in with Peter. She’d heard him getting up, heard the splash of the shower, and the buzz of his electric toothbrush. She’d heard him clatter down the stairs and bang the front door behind him and she’d burrowed down beneath the sheets and tried, desperately, to get back to sleep. Only she couldn’t. She wondered if she’d ever be able to sleep properly again.
Later she got up and walked around the house in her gray marl pajamas. She hadn’t had the inclination or the opportunity to do it before. She stood in the kitchen and thought how this was the second time in a few short weeks that she’d stood in the kitchen of some bloke’s house and looked inside his cupboards for coffee and cups and she felt herself start to tremble. Peter’s house — the house that he’d shared with Sandra and Aaron — was very different from Ben’s. Even though some of the original pictures or decorations were missing (there were lighter patches on the wallpaper which pointed to things that had been removed), it was clear to Carey that, unlike Ben’s, it was a home which had had the input of a woman in its decoration. There were pinks and pastels in some of the rooms, frills in others, and an entire ambience of femininity which was completely lacking in Portobello. But, Carey thought moodily as she spooned coffee from a patterned jar into a bright red mug, she’d felt more comfortable in Ben’s. The pinks and the frills weren’t really her thing.
She spent the day in her pajamas watching TV, gorging herself on a diet of Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, Judge Judy and Australian soaps, and telling herself that no matter how bad her life was, it paled into insignificance beside the insane traumas of Sally Jesse’s guests — although she supposed that she could appear in an episode captioned “My Love Rat Husband Had It Off with His Girlfriend at Our Wedding.” When she heard Peter’s car pull into the driveway she disappeared up the stairs and into the room where she now sat, her legs drawn up beneath her chin, her arms wrapped round them.
She didn’t want to talk to Peter. She didn’t want him to ask her about Ben or what had gone wrong or why she’d left him so suddenly. She didn’t want him to look sympathetically at her — Peter was good at the soulful, sympathetic look, which, along with his trim and toned body, made him almost irresistible. Really, all she wanted was to disappear off the face of the earth so that she didn’t have to talk to anyone ever again.
She blinked away the tears that filled her eyes. She was damned if she was going to cry over Ben or Peter or whoever was making her feel like this. She focused her gaze on her thirty-nine boxes of shoes, trying instead to remember which shoes were in which box, forcing herself to think of things that had nothing to do with the way she felt right now. Her mobile phone rang and she grabbed it.
“Yvette,” she said blankly, glancing at the caller ID as she answered it.
“Hi, Carey.” Yvette was a controller on another team. “How’re things?”
“Fine,” lied Carey.
“I was wondering if there was any chance you could swap shifts with me tomorrow?” asked Yvette. “I’m on the six a.m. one but I’ve got a meeting in Roberta’s school which I completely forgot about. I’m a bit stuck.”
“No problem.” Carey wasn’t due in until the afternoon and she was delighted at the opportunity to get out of the house earlier. She knew that she’d be awake anyway.
“Thanks a million.” Yvette sighed in relief. One of the most difficult things about being a single mother who worked shift hours was trying to remember where she was meant to be at any given moment. It wasn’t surprising that sometimes she got things wrong. “How’s married life treating you, Carey?”
“I’ll tell you about it another time.”
Yvette frowned, but the tone of Carey’s voice stopped her from asking any more. “Thanks again,” she said instead. “We must get together for a drink sometime soon.”
“Yes, we must.”
When she’d ended the call Carey scrolled through the menu on her phone. She looked at the list of received calls. There weren’t that many. Although the word was beginning to spread among some of her friends about her renewed single status, the word was also that she wasn’t prepared to talk about it yet. She looked at her list of missed calls. Two from Gina and one from Elena. They’d left messages. She’d already called them back. She dialed her message-minder service.
“You have no messages,” the automated voice told her cheerfully.
Carey closed her eyes. She hadn’t expected to have messages. She hadn’t expected to suddenly see a missed call which she knew she hadn’t missed. But she really and truly couldn’t believe that despite what she’d said to Ben and despite Gina yelling at him down the phone, he hadn’t once tried to call her again.
She knew that her brother, Tony, would tell her that she was being a typically irrational woman. She knew that when she’d written the note, she hadn’t wanted Ben to call. And she knew that she’d still been furious when he did call. When Gina had taken the phone away from her, she’d been half-relieved. But now she was torn about what she really wanted. Falling in love with Ben had been so sudden she was quite prepared to believe that falling out of love could be equally quick. People changed all the time. Not that she’d expected him to change so quickly, but why not? It just meant that she didn’t know who she’d married — the Ben of New York and Las Vegas, warm, wonderful and caring, or Irish Ben — womanizer, sullen, kisser of old girlfriends.
<
br /> Tears welled up in her eyes. Even if she didn’t want him back she wished that he’d wanted her. It was hard to accept that none of it had been real. Not his declarations of undying love, not his assurances that Leah meant nothing, not the feeling of completeness she’d felt with him. It had all been in her head; she’d been a bloody fool all over again, and when, she asked herself savagely, when would she ever learn?
This time she couldn’t keep back the tears. They slid down her cheeks and dropped onto the bright yellow quilt. It was difficult to know which was worse, she thought miserably, being a fool or being rejected. The knock at the door startled her and it came again before she answered.
“Yes?” She grabbed a couple of tissues from the box on the bedside locker and scrubbed her eyes.
“You OK?” asked Peter.
“Sure.”
“Can I come in?”
“If you like.”
The door opened and Peter walked in carrying a tray. On it was a big blue teapot, a blue cup, a jug of milk, and a plate of warm, buttered toast.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I have the feeling that you’re going through a sad and lonely phase,” said Peter. “I thought this might help.”
She swallowed hard and looked at him tearfully. “Thanks, but I’m not really hungry.”
“I know,” said Peter. “When Sandra and I finally split up I went through the not-hungry stage too. I’m sure girls must find it very useful if they’re dieting. I lost at least five pounds.”
“I could do with losing at least five pounds.” Carey sniffed.
“No you couldn’t,” said Peter sternly. “You’re not fat, Carey. You’re bony.”
“Not thin and bony,” she protested.
“Well, no,” he conceded. “But you don’t need to lose five pounds. You do need to eat properly.”
“You’re being very caring,” she told him.
“Not really,” said Peter. He poured tea into the cup and handed it to her. “I blame myself.”
“Pardon?”
“For you. For what’s happened.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Because of me you rushed into getting married to some moron. Because of me you’re unhappy again. I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t because of you,” said Carey.
“I feel as if it was.”
She shook her head. “It was because of me,” she said. “Because I’m a stupid cow who can’t think straight.”
“You’re not stupid,” said Peter tenderly. “You’re the cleverest, prettiest, nicest girl I’ve ever met.”
Carey blinked away the ever-present tears again. “Don’t say things you don’t really mean.”
“I’m not. I told you, Carey, it was me who was stupid before. I’m not being stupid now.”
She gulped a mouthful of tea. “You’re not trying to get off with me again, are you?”
He grinned. “It’s a bit transparent, I’ll admit. But all the best men’s magazines encourage us to be nice to women when they’re at their most vulnerable. And I do care about you very much.”
“I care about you too, Peter,” she said. “But I don’t want you getting the wrong idea of why I’m here.”
“How could I get the wrong idea?” he asked wryly. “You’ve spent all your time holed up in this room.”
“I’m not ready for anything else yet,” she told him. “I don’t want to talk to anyone else either.”
He looked at her appraisingly. “I love you,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Don’t tell me.” She put the cup back on the tray. “I can’t hear it right now, Peter. I really can’t. And if you really do feel like that, then I can’t stay here either.”
“Stay,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I won’t in future.”
She swallowed. “All the same, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“It’s a fine idea,” said Peter. “Really, Carey. Stay. It’s not for long anyway. And if you want to spend the entire time locked in this room, that’s OK by me.”
“Thanks.” She smiled bleakly at him.
He opened the bedroom door. “But feel free to come downstairs anytime you want either.”
Her smile was stronger this time. “Sure.”
She poured herself another cup of tea after he’d gone. As she was about to take the first sip, her phone rang again. She reached out hastily for it and knocked the cup over, the tea spilling across the bright yellow carpet.
“Oh bugger!” she said under her breath as she grabbed some tissues to soak it up while at the same time looking at her phone. “Double bugger,” she muttered as she realized that it was Sylvia who was calling.
Chapter Seventeen
EUCALYPTUS
A fresh, stimulating, and penetrating oil which is also antiseptic
A week later, Sylvia Lynch got out of her green Mondeo and walked up the pathway to her mother’s house. She hesitated for a moment before sliding her key into the front door and pushing it open. Then she called out that she was there.
“I’m in the conservatory,” rasped Maude.
Sylvia walked through the house and stood at the conservatory door. Maude was sitting in a wicker chair, a tartan blanket wrapped round her.
“How are you feeling?” asked Sylvia.
“I’m fine,” replied Maude testily. “I have laryngitis, that’s all. I don’t even have a cold. Your father insisted on trussing me up before he went out.”
“He worries about you.” Sylvia tucked the blanket more tightly around her mother.
“Will you stop!” ordered Maude. “I’m perfectly all right and I was only keeping this on me until you arrived so that you could report back to him that I was still wrapped up when you got here.”
Sylvia grinned at her mother. “You seem to be your usual self.”
“I am,” said Maude. “Just a huskier version of it.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Sylvia.
“That’d be nice,” said Maude. She sat back in her chair and listened to the sounds of Sylvia in the kitchen. She really hadn’t wanted her elder daughter to call round today; she felt perfectly well even though her voice was a whisper, but Arthur had rung Sylvia because he was due at his weekly chess game and he hadn’t wanted to leave Maude on her own. Silly old fool, Maude had thought as he brought the blanket from upstairs. Fusses far too much, though I’d hate it if he stopped.
“What are these for?” Sylvia appeared at the door holding a brightly colored box.
“Drinking, of course,” said Maude. She made a face. “Herbal teas. I bought them last month after meeting that Freya girl. She told me they were excellent.”
“Actually I knew what they were, I just didn’t think you were a herbal tea person.”
“I’m not.” Maude suddenly looked angry. “You can bloody well throw those out, Sylvia. I’m sure he drinks herbal teas. Make me a pot of Lyons.”
“Have you been talking to Carey lately?” asked Sylvia when she returned with two mugs of strong tea and sat down beside her mother.
“No,” croaked Maude. “She came to see us last week, but she was so distant…I don’t really know what to do. You know how she is, Sylvia. She won’t talk about it.”
“She was so stupid to get involved with him in the first place!” cried Sylvia. “We all knew it would end in disaster.”
“Not quite so quickly perhaps,” said Maude.
“No.” Sylvia sighed. “I can’t believe it really. He seemed so nice.”
“True.” Maude looked disappointed. “I enjoyed talking to him while he was here. And the party was such fun. I haven’t had as good a time in years!”
“What about our anniversary night out?” asked Sylvia abruptly. “You said you enjoyed that.”
“And I did, of course,” Maude rasped hastily. “It was just that this was so different from anything I’d been at in ages. I
really enjoyed myself. I liked talking to him. And his sister seemed really nice.”
“Southsiders,” said Sylvia in her most scathing tone.
Maude laughed painfully and then coughed while Sylvia looked at her anxiously.
“I’m all right,” Maude assured her. “So have you seen her?”
Sylvia shook her head. “I’m meeting her for a sandwich at lunchtime, but it took me ages to persuade her.”
“Has she said anything about a divorce?”
“Not to me,” said Sylvia, “but I bet she can get one easily enough. Sure they’re hardly even married, are they?”
“I don’t know,” said Maude worriedly. “I just wish that for once she’d think before she did anything.”
“So do I,” said Sylvia. She hesitated and then went on, “You know where she’s living now?”
“She told me she was sharing a house with a friend.” Maude looked anxiously at Sylvia. “Why? Is there a problem?”
“The friend she’s sharing a house with is the bloke she was going out with before she got married.”
“Sylvia!” Maude’s voice was somewhere between a squeak and a croak. “Not the married man!”
“I don’t know anything about a married man,” said Sylvia in surprise. “I know so little about her life that she could be keeping a harem of blokes and I wouldn’t have a clue. But if there was a married man, then she’s currently sharing his house.”
“And the wife?”
Sylvia shrugged expressively. “Who knows?”
“Oh, God.” Maude pressed her fingers against her forehead. “Where did I go wrong with that girl? I brought her up the same way as I brought you up. I thought I was doing all the right things. How come it’s all gone haywire?”
“I don’t know,” said Sylvia. “I do know that she was always hopeless with boyfriends and that she clearly hasn’t got any better.” She smiled at Maude. “But I’ll try and find out how things are progressing at lunch.”
Too Good to Be True Page 24
