Eventually Abe called me. He had a meeting that morning, near Blackfriars, and didn’t have to go back to the office until later. Was there any chance I could meet him? He knew it was short notice but he really wanted to see me.
The children had after-school clubs on Monday. I didn’t have to pick them up until later. I could ask a friend to be on call, tell them I had to go into town for a meeting, in case anything happened.
We discussed a few other things, made the necessary arrangements, and a couple of hours later, I found myself looking for Abe in the bar of a Premier Inn, then following him towards the lift, stepping out, walking down a corridor, watching him as he took the key card out of his pocket and opened the door to the room.
There was none of the hesitancy of our previous encounter. As soon as the door was closed, I was in Abe’s arms and he was kissing and beginning to undress me. We were in bed within seconds, making love with an urgency that was at odds with our having seen each other a few days earlier. Had I ever felt such intense overwhelming desire for anyone before? Did the illicitness of the encounter make it seem so? I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was that I wanted Abe more than anything else in the world at that moment. And then it was over, too quickly, all our energies spent, and Abe was looking at his watch in a way that made me feel awful.
‘Do you have to get back to the office?’ I hoped I didn’t sound as peevish as I felt.
‘Not just yet,’ he said, and we lay for a while, my head on his chest, talking about life, about how random it is, about the possibility that we might never have met but we had.
‘Do you want a bath?’ Abe asked, and I suppose that was as nice a way of signalling that he had to make a move as any. ‘We could have one together.’
He went to run it, calling me from the bathroom and allowing me to get in first before stepping in behind me, opening his legs so that I could lean back against him in the water. It was almost unbearable, the thought of having to get dressed and leave, as he ran his hands all over my body, smoothing the bubbles of the bath gel over my skin.
He got out first, wrapped a towel around himself, then held one out for me, wrapping it round me and rubbing me gently until I was dry. He looked at his watch again and I took my cue.
‘We should get dressed.’
‘Do you have to go now?’ he asked.
‘I thought you did.’
‘I’ve still got time, if you have.’
I nodded.
‘Let’s go back to bed,’ Abe said, and when I lay down, on top of the covers, he walked to the foot of the bed, bent down and kissed the inside of my ankles, slowly, gently, before working his way up the inside of my thigh and kissing every part of my body, except where I was longing to feel him kiss me the most.
He was kissing my stomach, moving up and over my breasts, and then his mouth was on mine and I wanted to him to head back down to the area he’d skirted, but instead he put his hand there and began stroking me. I reached out to touch him too but he moved my hand away.
‘Not yet,’ he said, looking at me. ‘I want to see you. I want to look at you, while I touch you.’
The Ivy who had been married to someone for several years would have been under the covers with her eyes closed, but the part of me that had been brought to life by someone new, and the unfamiliarity of the way he explored my body, lay on the bed, watching, as the man who was not her husband moved his hand expertly, and allowing herself to look into his eyes as she moved against it.
‘Ivy,’ Abe said, and I wondered if the intensity of the feeling that flooded through me registered in my eyes.
He held me afterwards, not allowing me to reciprocate. ‘Next time,’ he said quietly, taking my hand as if it to signal that this was going somewhere. I didn’t allow myself to wonder where, that was too scary, just luxuriated in being with someone who made me feel things I’d not felt for so long: as if I was alive, not just living but really, truly alive.
If you asked me to pinpoint the moment when I started to drift away from Richard I’d say it was after Jon and Anne’s party, after hearing Cathy’s news. Quite why my sister’s revelation should have thrown us off course is hard to say. Perhaps we had been storing up different resentments, and that was the point at which they began to emerge …
‘Why don’t you go on your own and I’ll stay at home and look after the children?’ Richard asks. He phrases it as if he’s doing everyone a favour but I know he was never keen to come in the first place. So it’s not a favour, it’s an excuse.
‘No. I’ll sort something out,’ I say tetchily. ‘Lottie can always go with Max, if necessary, or she can come with us.’
‘But wouldn’t it be easier if –’
‘No! I want you to be there. I don’t want to go on my own.’
We have this argument, or a version of it, too often at the moment.
At the last minute, Richard will say he’s too tired to do something we’ve planned to do together. ‘You go on your own,’ he’ll say, as if it doesn’t matter to me whether he comes or not.
‘But I’d rather you were with me.’ It will spiral from there.
Richard works hard. I know he’s under pressure and the children don’t make home the most relaxing of places but I’m tired too. I work for myself, so theoretically I can fit in with the children but in practice this often means I have to finish off projects late at night, after they’ve gone to bed.
My preference is often for an early night rather than going out. But if we never make time to do anything together, if we don’t make sure there is still an us, not just Mum and Dad, Max and Lottie, I worry it might happen again.
Richard’s an architect. It’s not a career that attracts a huge number of women. When one appeared in his office while I was knee deep in nappies and not paying him much attention, the attraction proved too great to resist. That is, of course, a gross simplification of what happened.
I remember the physical shock when I read the text message. We were on holiday in Corfu. We’d rented a villa with a pool on the north-east coast with views across the narrow strait to Albania. Richard had brought binoculars and would use them to focus on the opposite shores picking out high-rise buildings and declaring them ‘brutalist Communist monstrosities’.
‘We should go,’ I’d suggested. There was a day trip to Tirana from Corfu Town. ‘I could practically swim there!’ In the past, people had tried to cross the two-mile strip of water to escape the oppression and deprivation of the regime there. Some had made it. More had drowned or been shot by Albanian soldiers, who patrolled the waters in military vessels.
We never went. Max and Lottie were more than happy to spend their days by the pool and on the beach, punctuated by ice creams and meals in waterfront tavernas or chatting to the elderly Greek woman who came to clean and change the sheets every other day.
‘Lottie,’ she would call out in a happy sing-song voice, pronouncing the ie with two syllables: ‘Lott-y-a’.
‘Lottie, is this your friend?’ She’d pick up a toy from the floor and tuck it carefully into the freshly made bed.
‘Maximilian!’ she would call to Max. Clearly both names were too short for her to relish. ‘I’ve found a work of art,’ she said, indicating one of Max’s inexpertly crayoned drawings.
They would follow her around the house, enthralled and happy. We all were for a few days.
‘No phones,’ we had agreed before we left home, but of course we had brought them.
I hadn’t switched mine on but Richard would check his daily, commenting on the number of messages he’d had from the phone network, welcoming him to Albania. The narrow passage of water formed a geographical border between Greece and Albania but mobile-phone signals had no respect for such.
‘I dread to think what the bill will be like, when we get home,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t think Albania is covered in my contract.’
But the phone bill was the least of his worries.
The children were napping one aftern
oon and I’d gone to read on our bed, where it was cooler, when Richard’s phone had vibrated loudly from the drawer in the unit on his side of the bed.
I hadn’t been looking to catch him out. In hindsight, when I thought about it, I’d been deliberately ignoring the signs that were there, subconsciously thinking that if I did not look then I could not be upset.
When I stretched across the bed and opened the drawer, I was thinking only that I might take the phone to him but it was the initials that intrigued me. There was a message from ‘CPG’. Why no name? Maybe it was just another mobile phone company, I told myself, as something spurred me to click on the message and open it. I’m sorry. I know we said we wouldn’t get in touch while you were with your family. I could hardly bear to go on, to scroll down further but I was compelled to do so. But I miss you so much. Call me if you get a moment. I just want to hear your voice Cxx
I deleted the message and put the phone back. I decided there and then that I would say nothing until we were home again. I tried to pretend that nothing had changed but Richard could tell something wasn’t right. I was short with the kids and tetchy with him.
‘What the hell’s the matter?’ he snapped angrily one evening, as we both got ready for bed.
‘You tell me,’ I said, glaring at him accusingly, and he began to crumble, his anger towards me replaced by fear.
‘How?’ he said, sitting on the bed and putting his head in his hands. ‘How did you know?’
Somehow we got through the next few days, and talked – I screamed at him – when we got home. He ended it and we struggled on for a few months, for the rest of the year, but I was surprised by how quickly his affair became a thing of the past and how well the wounds healed.
We could talk about it now, prompted by news of friends caught in the aftermath of infidelity or a storyline in a TV drama. ‘I suppose I felt like that when you had your fling,’ I could say with equanimity, finding that time and the fact that we were still close had erased the hurt.
‘It wasn’t because I didn’t love you,’ Richard had said back then. ‘It just happened.’
His words weren’t particularly comforting, yet they were probably true. Richard was ambitious at work, he had grand plans for projects and envisaged a bright future for himself, but in his private life he seemed never to think far beyond what was happening at the moment.
That had been part of the attraction when I’d met him, a year after Mum died, a year after a brief but promising dalliance had ended in a way that made me wonder if I’d ever have a relationship that lasted. It was hard to blame that particular boyfriend for running away. He’d found himself thrust into a family in the midst of grief and reckoning. I’d have done the same if I’d been him.
I met Richard by chance, and when that happens it’s easy to convince yourself that Fate brought you together.
We’d been to the theatre, Dad, Jon, Anne and I. It was a treat for Dad’s birthday, Michael Frayn’s new play, Copenhagen. Dad had let us buy the tickets but he insisted on pre-ordering and paying for the interval drinks. I was still pondering the first act when we made our way to the bar. Two physicists meet in the Danish capital and years later, after their deaths, their spirits discuss the various ramifications of that initial meeting. ‘What if the atomic bomb had never been built?’ they ask. ‘Would the future that is now the past have been inevitable or uncertain?’
‘I’m not sure I quite understood it all,’ I said to Dad.
‘I’m not sure you’re supposed to,’ he replied. ‘Now. Can you find our drinks? They’re under my name.’
It was crowded in the bar so Dad let me swim through the sea of theatregoers to locate our order. I’ve forgotten what everyone asked for, only that I’d wanted white wine and Dad a glass of red. I found an order, which included both, under the name ‘Richard’. There were two gin and tonics alongside the wine. That must have been what Jon and Anne ordered. I took a sip of my wine, then picked up the tray with the two G and Ts and Dad’s red, to carry them through the crowd to the periphery where my family was waiting.
‘Excuse me.’ I heard a voice at my shoulder, turned round and looked up at my future husband. Of course I didn’t know that yet, any more than Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg knew what the consequences of their work on the atom would be when they first met in Denmark in 1941.
‘I think those are my drinks,’ the man said.
‘No,’ I contradicted him. ‘They’re ours.’
‘Richard Smith?’ He pointed to the name on the sheet.
I hadn’t looked properly and the ‘Smith’ had been obscured by a glass. ‘Oh, God, sorry. You’re right. I’m looking for Trent, Richard Trent.’
‘Just along there. Almost took your drinks myself,’ he said, smiling.
‘But I’ve already had a sip of the white.’ I was flustered. ‘I’ll get the one that’s ours and bring it back to you.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘The white’s mine. I don’t mind you having a sip of it, unless you’re carrying some deadly disease?’
‘No.’
He’d meant it as a joke but the play, the what-if scenarios, being with Dad on his own, and Jon and Anne, knowing what they knew, I didn’t laugh and some of my thoughts must have been reflected in my face.
‘It was a joke,’ Richard Smith said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry for the mix-up.’
‘Easily done,’ he said.
I thought, That’s it, I’ll never see him again, but afterwards I was waiting in the foyer for Dad and Jon, who had gone to the Gents, and Anne, who was in a longer queue for the Ladies.
‘So, did you enjoy the play?’ Richard Smith had appeared from nowhere.
‘Yes. It was interesting. Did you? And your friends?’ I looked around to see whom he was with but he seemed to be on his own now.
‘Work colleagues,’ he said. ‘One left his briefcase in the auditorium. They’ve all gone back to look for it.’
‘Oh. I hope they find it.’
‘I’m Richard, by the way,’ he said, and put out his hand. ‘Richard Smith.’
‘I know that!’ I laughed. There was something about him and his directness that I liked. ‘Ivy,’ I said. ‘Ivy Trent.’
‘And are you here with friends?’ he asked.
‘Family. My dad, my brother and his wife.’
‘Ah.’
‘So what are you and your colleagues?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said you were with colleagues. What do you all do?’
‘Oh, I see,’ he said, as I caught sight of Dad and Jon coming down the stairs to join me. ‘I’m an architect.’ He fished in his pocket and handed me a card.
I took it and nodded towards Dad. ‘I ought to go now.’
‘Well, if you ever want to discuss a physicists’ work outing to Copenhagen in more detail,’ he said, ‘you’ve got my number.’
I did. I put the card with Richard Smith’s name and work number in my purse and the following Monday, when I was at work, I called. It felt bold, and I was relieved when his PA answered and I was able to ask her to tell him that Ivy Trent had rung and to leave my number.
Minutes later he called back.
Perhaps Richard told his friends ‘it just happened’ with me, as the affair with his colleague ‘just happened’. He tended to let things happen and didn’t worry about the consequences.
I told him about Mum early on, and outlined the implications but they didn’t seem to scare him. He’d lost his mother too. Perhaps that was another factor in us being drawn to each other. He rarely speaks of her now, finding it easier not to. She died in a car accident when he was ten. But, occasionally, one of the children will ask him something.
‘You’re luckier than Mum because you’ve got a mum but Mum doesn’t,’ a confused Max said to him.
‘But I don’t have a mother either.’ Richard was perplexed. ‘That’s why you’ve only got granddads, no grans.’
‘But Mum is your
mum,’ Max said.
‘No, Max.’ Richard had laughed. ‘Mum’s my wife not my mum.’
‘Then why do you call her “Mum”?’ he’d asked earnestly.
Richard and I had looked at each other and laughed, but it saddened me too. It was only when Lottie was born that he’d started to call me ‘Mum’. After Max, I’d still been Ivy.
It was as if he’d made a conscious decision to think of me as someone else, a mother, no longer his wife. Lottie’s birth had been difficult where Max’s was surprisingly easy. She had turned at the last minute, come out feet first and nearly strangled herself with the umbilical cord. Richard had had to watch while they pushed her back in and whisked me off for an emergency Caesarean. I know it affected him but he doesn’t like to talk about it, any more than he likes to talk about his mother and the spectre that looms over my family.
That suits me. Another man might have wanted to keep torturing me with what-ifs but Richard is happy to live in hope that the worst may never happen. Another woman, another version of myself even, might have thought longer and harder before opting to make a life with Richard. I might have wondered if Richard was right for me, if he was my soul-mate or if there was someone better suited to me. Perhaps Richard pondered the advisability of marrying and having children with someone who might be destined to die young and pass on that fate to his children.
‘We’ll deal with it when and if we have to,’ is all he will say on the subject.
We chose not to think too much, to accept what was good and make a go of us.
‘Dad’s mother died before you were born, Max,’ I’d told him, ‘so she never got to meet you.’
‘She’d have loved you, though,’ Richard added.
Max was now eight and Lottie six. They should have been having sleepovers with friends while Richard and I went to Jon and Anne’s party. But Lottie’s friend is sick and her mother’s not sure about having her. Richard wants to use the excuse to stay at home. ‘What’s the party in aid of this time anyway?’ he asks.
Ivy and Abe Page 11
