by Tess Stimson
“I was in Court all day, I told you that. When was I supposed to have time?”
I remove two putrescent tomatoes and something that may once have been a block of cheese but which is now an homage to Alexander Fleming, and cast wildly about for the dustbin. Of course this is pointless, since Sara uses supermarket plastic bags hung on the knob of the cupboard nearest the door in lieu of the traditional rubbish receptacle; a practice rendered even more irksome when the bags leak, as they frequently do, all over the floor. Only this morning I found myself standing in a puddle of last night’s Chinese takeaway as I spooned fresh coffee into the percolator.
Rotten tomato is oozing through my fingers by the time I locate the bag and dispose of them. I swear under my breath as I rinse my hands in the sink. Dear God, I haven’t lived like this since I was an impoverished student at Oxford.
Sara skulks into the galley kitchen. “You didn’t have to throw out the cheese, Nick! I could’ve scraped the mold off.”
“And poisoned us both.”
“Cheese is milk gone moldy, everyone knows that. It doesn’t go off.”
“Fine.” I fling open cupboard doors. “I gave you two hundred pounds on Tuesday to go to Waitrose, and the only thing in the damn larder is a bottle of Tabasco and four tins of fucking anchovies. What the hell happened?”
“I spent it,” she mutters.
“On what? Bloody truffles?”
“I left my credit card at home, and I saw these shoes. I was going to pay you back,” she adds defensively as I storm into the sitting room, nearly tripping over the wretched cat. I wish I hadn’t bought her the animal; this entire apartment stinks of piss. She picks up the kitten and follows me. “I just haven’t been to the cash-point yet.”
“It’s not the damn money, Sara. It just would’ve been nice to come back and find something to eat—”
“I’m not your freakin’ servant,” Sara spits.
“Sara, I’ve just buried my father!”
Startled, the cat springs out of her arms. Sara deflates like a pricked balloon, and I’m reminded, yet again, how very young she is.
Moving in with her was a mistake. I knew it even as I unpacked the holdall of clothes Mal had left in the taxi for me—each of my shirts carefully folded so as not to crease—and crammed them into Sara’s overstuffed wardrobe on cheap wire coat hangers. I had nowhere else to go, other than a hotel; but in the end, practicalities were the least of it. It was the desperate need to salvage something from this whole sorry débâcle that made me agree to Sara’s feverish suggestion. For the misery and grief I have caused to have been for a reason.
If we work at it, it’s bound to get better. It’s just a question of adjusting.
“I thought there’d be something to eat,” she mumbles now, eyes on the ground, “at the wake. I assumed you’d just come home and we’d—you know.”
“We’d what?”
She grinds her toe into the carpet like a small, embarrassed child. “In the midst of life we are in death, and all that. Amy said when people die, you want to celebrate life. Oh, come on, Nick, do I have to spell it out?”
I suddenly notice that she’s wearing a very short pleated gray skirt and has her hair in short schoolgirl bunches. Even as I sigh inwardly at her naïveté, my cock springs to life.
“Man cannot live on sex alone. Although,” I add, “I appreciate the thought.”
She drops to her knees in front of me, unzips my trousers, and releases my semierect cock from my boxer shorts. Through the uncurtained window behind her, I can see straight into a block of flats opposite. I watch a fat woman struggle out of a green wool jacket. She glances up as she hangs it on the back of the door, and I realize that if I can see her, the reverse must also hold true. She’s too far away for me to see her expression, but the way she snaps her drapes shut speaks volumes.
I’m not really in the mood; but the thought of being watched as Sara kneels and sucks my hardening dick is an unexpected aphrodisiac.
In fact, I realize, I’m about to come: too soon. I grab her shoulders and pull her upright, then shunt her up onto the breakfast bar. She pulls her white blouse over her head without troubling to undo the buttons, and I scoop her breasts from the lacy bra and clamp my mouth around a cherry red nipple. She groans and buries her hands beneath my shirt. I bite and nip, not troubling to be careful. Her fingernails scrape and claw at my back. I bunch her skirt up around her waist, pulling off her panties and thrusting my fingers forcefully inside her. She’s slick and wet, and I lick my fingertips afterward. Her eyes half close as she leans back on her elbows, opening her pussy to me.
I taste her, relishing the musky sweetness. And then I lift her off the counter, push her forward over the uncomfortable white sofa, and plunge my dick into her backside.
She gasps in shock, but after a moment’s hesitation, starts to grind her hips in time with mine. As her movements get more frantic, I thrust faster, reaching around to knead her breasts, trapping her nipples—none too gently—between thumb and forefingers.
I come in an explosion. As I slump over her sweat-slicked back, I glance up through the window again. The fat woman is staring right back at me.
“Fuck,” Sara pants, twisting round. “Can we finish up in the bedroom? This sofa still stinks of puke.”
It took my father three weeks to die. He survived the initial massive stroke, only to succumb to an infection originating at the site of his IV line. The cause of death, according to the somber gray certificate with which I was presented upon registering his passing: septicemia leading to multiple organ failure.
I don’t know if I could be said to have got there in time. He was still, technically, alive when I arrived posthaste from London, so consumed with fear that I was able, briefly, to banish the excoriating circumstances of my summons in some uncharted corner of my mind to deal with later. But he was already unconscious by the time I reached his bedside, and so we never had a chance to exchange a last word, a final farewell. I was left to sit helplessly beside the husk of the man who had once been my father, stroking his hand—occasionally his cheek—and trying to talk to him as if I really believed he could still hear me.
Since we are being technical, Edward Lyon wasn’t actually my father at all, but my father’s elder brother. My biological parents achieved the unusual distinction of being killed in the same car crash in two separate cars.
Andrew Lyon had been having an affair with his dental nurse. My mother, upon discovering this—quite how never became clear—confronted him and a domestic fracas naturally ensued. She fled in her car; he pursued her in his. It was subsequently impossible to establish which of them lost control on a sharp bend first, and which smashed into the other’s wreckage. Very little survived the fireball, and of course forensic science in the sixties was not what it is now.
Edward and his wife, Daisy, took me in. I was six months old; they have always been my parents in every sense that matters.
I have often wondered what kind of man could embark upon an affair when his wife had just presented him with their first child. Now, perhaps, I know.
Bad blood. Is there a gene for infidelity, I wonder, like those for baldness or big feet? All my life, I have tried to atone for the sins of my biological father. Made a career out of picking up the pieces of adultery, in fact. Hubristically, I believed that of all the men I knew, I was without doubt the least likely to have an affair.
This afternoon I stood at my father’s graveside, my arm around my mother, and watched my wife, her face undone by tears. Of course I grieve for my father; his death has left a void in my life that nothing can fill; but there is a point every adult child reaches when they unconsciously begin to prepare for their parents’ deaths. You ache for your loss, but it is the natural order of things. Nature renders us heartlessly resilient when necessary.
Losing the woman you love through your own stupidity, weakness, and mendacity is another matter. Stultum est queri de adversis, ubi culpa est tua: Stupid to
complain about misfortune that is your own fault. Nature erects no self-protecting carapace for such preventable misery. Nor should she; I deserve the obloquy now being heaped upon me from all quarters.
Except, astonishingly, from Malinche.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said quietly, stopping beside me as I handed my mother into the waiting funeral car. “I wanted to wait you out. I did try.”
A sea of mourners washed past on either side of the car, newly turned earth sticking like coffee grounds to their stiff black shoes. Muted snatches of consolation—“So sorry, Nicholas”—eddied around us. April seems such an inappropriate month in which to bury someone, with its pledge of life. I wanted bare branches scraping at leaden gray skies, not this green-bladed promise and birdsong.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the Law Society dinner.”
“How did you—?”
“Nicholas,” she whispered.
I looked away. On the gravel path behind us, a knot of black-clad mourners stopped to chat; a rising laugh was hastily smothered with a quick, abashed glance in our direction. We can only do grief and pain for so long, before life surges back out of us, bidden or not.
I took a deep breath. “Malinche, is there any chance I could come—”
“No, Nicholas. I’m sorry.”
Inside the car, my mother glanced fleetingly at us, and then looked away.
“I know how this must sound: but it didn’t mean anything. Please—”
“Of course it meant something,” she said sharply, “to me, if not to you! You aren’t the only one affected by this. It’s not up to you to decide if it meant something or not.”
“I realize you’re angry now, but—”
“Angry doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“You can’t mean to go through with this. Separation. A divorce. Surely?”
She stepped backward slightly, as if I had just dealt her a physical blow. “What else did you expect, Nicholas?”
“Can’t we at least talk?” I said desperately. “What about the children, did you think about what this will—”
“Did you?”
In the distance, two men in blue overalls walked toward my father’s grave, chatting, clods of dry earth falling from the shovels over their shoulders.
Mal watched me watch them and sighed. “Nicholas, now isn’t the time. I’ve told the children you’re looking after Grandma at the moment. When the time is right, we can tell them that you—that we—”
“Can I see them?”
“Of course you can see them!” She touched my arm; briefly. Her face softened. “I would have brought them to see you before, but you were always either working or at the hospital. It didn’t seem right to involve them in all of that.”
I should have established a pattern of access immediately. Set precedent, worked out ground rules for visitation. How many times have I rebuked a client for failing precisely in this regard, thus enabling the other side to allege noninvolvement, disinterest, neglect? Never considering for one moment that they simply couldn’t face the children they’d so badly let down.
Mal shifted on her feet, imperceptibly, but enough to tell me that she was finished here. My heart clenched. Suddenly my head was filled with a thousand things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her more than I could have thought possible, that I had never stopped loving her, that I had been a complete and utter fool. I would do anything, promise everything, if she’d just give me a second chance. That my life without her was ashes. And yet, like Lear’s daughter, unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’d like to see them this weekend, if that’s all right.”
Her expression flickered, as if she’d been expecting me to say something else.
“They’d love to see you, too,” she said, after a moment. “Where?”
“I couldn’t come—”
She half turned, presenting me with her profile. “No.”
“Not McDonald’s. Or a park. I couldn’t face it.”
“And not—”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said quickly. “My parents’, then? Or,” I added, “rather, my mother’s. I wonder how long that will take to get used to?”
“He was a good man,” she said warmly, “your father.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“Nicholas. I loved him, too.”
Perhaps ten feet away from us, a man hovered. I hadn’t noticed him before, but now that he’d caught my attention, I couldn’t imagine why not. He was extremely good-looking, with that rumpled Steve McQueen edge women inevitably find attractive. And he was clearly waiting for my wife. She smiled sadly, briefly, at me, and then turned, walking toward him. He didn’t touch her, but there was something in the way he bent toward her, like a poplar to a riverbank, that told me there was a history between them of which I was not a part.
And for the first time it hit me that I’d lost her.
He’s there too when she drops off the girls at my mother’s house the following Saturday, sitting in the passenger seat of my wife’s car.
I take Metheny from her mother and nod toward the Volvo.
“Who’s that?”
Mal unshoulders a cumbersome quilted bag filled with Metheny’s detritus: nappies, cream, plastic beaker, Calpol, spare pacifier, spare clothes, spare blanket. “Make sure she sleeps for at least an hour in the afternoon, but don’t let her go beyond two; she’ll never settle for the night. She’s started taking the beaker of apple juice to bed, but don’t forget to water it down first. And for heaven’s sake, don’t lose the Wiggle-Wiggle book, she had the house in an uproar last week when we couldn’t find it—”
“Malinche, I do know.”
She stops rummaging. “Yes. Of course.”
Sophie and Evie bound up the garden path toward me, hair flying.
“Daddy! Daddy! Mummy said we can stay all night at Grandma’s house! I brought my new satin pajamas, Uncle Kit gave them to me for Easter, he said they were much better than chocolate, I look like Veronica Lake, who’s Veronica Lake, Daddy, do I look like her?”
“You don’t look like a lake, you look like a big fat puddle,” Evie says crossly, “you’re a big muddy fat puddle.”
Sophie smirks and folds her arms. In an irritating, singsong voice, she chants, “I know you are, but what am I?”
“Puddle head. Puddle head.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Puddle head—”
“I know you are, but what—”
“I’ll see you all tomorrow afternoon, girls,” Mal says blithely, kissing each in turn. “Be good for Daddy. And give Grandma lots of extra cuddles, she’s missing Grandpa and she needs them.”
Metheny’s sweet brow furrows as she watches her mother walk down the garden path. For twenty seconds she is silent, and then as Mal gets into the car, she starts to squirm in my arms, plump fists flailing as she realizes her mother isn’t coming back. I march firmly into the house and shut the front door as she starts to turn red, then blue, with temper, waiting for the familiar bellow of sound.
“Oh, dear Lord,” my mother says nervously. “What’s wrong with the child?”
“She’ll be fine in a minute, Mother. Sophie, leave your sister alone. Evie, stop fiddling with that lamp—”
We all wince as the scream finally reaches us. I’m reminded of counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and the thunderclap to work out how far away the storm is.
I jounce my youngest daughter against my chest. Her screams intensify.
“Metheny, sweetheart, calm down, Daddy’s here. Mummy will be back soon. Breathe, darling, please breathe. Sophie, please. You’re the eldest, you should be setting an example—”
There’s a crash. Evie jumps guiltily away from the kitchen windowsill.
“Not the Beatrix Potter!” my mother wails. “Nicholas, I’ve had that lamp since you were a baby
!”
Metheny, shocked into silence by the sudden noise, buries her wet face in my shoulder. I apologize to my mother and hand the hiccuping toddler over to Sophie with relief. “Take her into the back garden for a run around while I clear up this mess. You too, Evie. We’ll talk about this later. Oh, and Sophs?”
I have always despised clients who use their children to snoop on their spouses.
“That man who came with you today,” I say, with studied casualness. “I don’t think I recognized him—”
“He’s a friend of Mummy’s.” She shrugs, banging out into the garden. “The one she does all the cooking with.”
I digest this news as I sweep up the shards of broken china. So that was the famous Trace Pitt, Mal’s onetime boyfriend and current boss. I hadn’t realized he was quite so young. And attractive. And close to my wife.
I wonder if his sudden ubiquity is the staunch support of an old friend in times of need (in which case: why not Kit?); or altogether something more.
And if the latter, how long has it been going on?
I am thoughtfully emptying the dustpan into an old newspaper when Evie runs back in with muddy feet and a bunch of flowers almost as big as herself. “I got these for Grandma, to say sorry for the old lamp.” She beams from behind the blooms. “Aren’t they pretty?”
My mother moans softly. “My prize cheiranthus.”
She retreats upstairs for a lie-down, while I struggle dispiritedly to impose order on the childish chaos Mal normally keeps efficiently in check. I dose Metheny up with a preemptive teaspoon of Calpol and finally manage to get her down for her nap, but Sophie and Evie squabble continuously for the rest of the afternoon, refusing to settle to anything approaching sibling harmony even when I break every household rule and permit unrestricted access to the television on a sunny day.
“The stupid TV’s too small,” Sophie says sulkily, drumming her heels on the base of the overstuffed sofa. “And there’s no Cartoon Network.”
“Please don’t kick the furniture, Sophie. Evie, if you need to wipe your nose, use a handkerchief, not the back of your sleeve.”
