Separate Lives (18 page)

“Yes, Daddy was a little bit mean but I think he's just tired,” I said, though the truth was I felt sick to my stomach.

On the stoop, I recalled this scene and the tears welled up. I shivered, went back into the house, poured a cup of coffee for Alex and eventually located him on the top floor, wearing a martyrish expression while fitting roller-blinds in the third—count 'em—bathroom.

“Coffee. Um, Alex? Do you think it's the best use of your time, forever wielding your power-tools?”

“And what does that mean?”

“Just that the house is fine. It's not falling down. Maybe the DIY should be shoe-horned into your free time?”

“This is my free time. I don't have a job, remember?”

“Well yes, but maybe putting up blinds is just a distraction from the more important stuff? This bathroom isn't overlooked. In fact we don't even use it. And without any blinds you can see the moon . . .” I trailed off, already regretting instigating this conversation.

“It's the guest bathroom. And seeing as we apparently run a hotel these days . . .” Alex sighed. “Look, just let me do stuff my way, OK? Stop hassling me every five minutes. Maybe I need some time to think about the rest of my life—our lives—and if I do that while I'm also putting up blinds, what bloody difference does it make to you? We're OK for money. What's the problem? Why are you always on my case?”

“I'm not.” But I was.

“You are. It's as if you're disappointed in me now I'm no longer the ‘Big Magazine Publisher.'” This was unnerving: he was using air-quotes again. “It's as if you think I'm now some sort of sad burden instead of an asset. Not Alpha enough for you anymore? That's what it feels like.” Alex put down the coffee, picked up the drill and turned away.

“Please don't turn your back on me. I really think we should carry on talking.”

“And you can stop fucking well speaking to me as though I'm six years old.”

“Alex. What the hell is going on? You're different. Can't you see you're different? Where's the sense of humor I loved so much? Where's your sense of fun? You're bloody miserable to be around, forever sniping at the kids. It's like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders instead of a beautiful house and a family who loves you and the possibility of a career that will fulfill you more than it stresses you out. It feels like you're slipping away from us, Alex . . .”

The words were rolling out now—an unstoppable seven-month incoming tide of words breaking on the shores of Random-on-Sea.

“Alex. Are you having an affair? Are you seeing Pippa?”

Silence, but for the drill.

“Alex? ALEX, turn the fucking drill off!” I leaned over to the socket and flicked the switch. “Alex, will you please talk to me? I just asked if you were having an affair . . . with Pippa?”

Alex's expression was unrecognizable. Or, more accurately, he was unrecognizable as the Alex I knew, though the expression was recognizable enough. It was one I was getting to know quite well. He put down the silent drill and leaned against the dove-gray tongue-and-groove bathroom wall, just to the left of the windowsill artlessly decorated with seashells and pebbles.

“No, Susie, I am not having an affair. Not with Pippa or anyone else. But if I was having an affair I'd hardly be likely to admit it, would I? In the same way you wouldn't admit it if you were having an affair. And you talk about me having changed? Ha. Pot, kettle, black. You might want to take a look at yourself. As for your sense of humor, well you're pretty insufferable to be around a lot of the time. Maybe I just didn't see it when we weren't under the same roof, all day, every bloody day, but I'm sure as hell seeing it now. And I like it about as much as you like the unemployed version of me.”

“Alex . . .”

“Don't ‘Alex' me. Just leave me the fuck alone for a bit. Oh and by the way I'm out later, with Phil, so don't bother cooking for me tonight, OK?”

And Alex turned his back and picked up his drill and I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make things
a lot worse than they already were, so I left the bathroom and walked slowly down several flights of stairs to the basement utility room and even more slowly emptied the washing machine of its first load of bed linen and filled it with the second. Trying hard not to think, I sought sanctuary in doing.

Alex went out about 7 p.m., before the kids were in bed. This had never happened before, much less on a Monday.

“Where are you going, Daddy?” asked Lula, freshly bathed and sitting at the kitchen table in a new pink, satiny nightdress—posh pajamas having recently been firmly rejected in favor of nightwear that looked like something Jodie Foster might have worn in
Taxi Driver
. She was drawing pairs of shoes in glittery pen.

“Out,” said Alex. “Night night. Be good for Mummy.” And he patted her on the head, distractedly.

“Night night, Daddy,” said Charlie, leaning forward in his chair for a hug. But Alex didn't seem to notice. Instead he checked his phone, glanced at his watch and patted Chuck on the head without making eye-contact.

“Night, Big Man, be good.” He glanced at me: “I won't be too late.” And then he was gone.

“Why's Daddy going out on a Monday, Mummy? He never goes out on a Monday,” said Lula as she filled in a wobbly-looking stack-heeled stiletto with purple glitter.

“I don't know, darling. Biscuit?”

Later, when the kids were in bed, I microwaved some cauliflower cheese leftovers from their supper the night before, ate a bag of Revels and drank a large glass of Sauvignon before taking the second one outside on to the front steps, where, in the balmy June evening, I sat and looked at the clear star-studded sky. And then because there was
no longer enough to do, inevitably I started to think. And because I really didn't want to think, I had to find something to do. Briefly I considered texting Alex—I wrote one but then thought better of it. Then, on the spur of the moment, I wrote another, different text. And this one I did send.

The phone rang less than a minute later.

“Susie?”

“Yes. That's definitely me.”

“What's up? What's wrong? Something must be wrong.”

“I don't know. I mean, yes, something's wrong, I just don't know what. I'm sorry—have I interrupted anything? Are you busy?”

“No, not busy. It's a good time for me. But maybe not for you?”

“It's all going wrong.”

“How do you mean, ‘wrong'? I thought it was all going right—for all of you?”

“On the surface it is, but underneath, not so right. I don't think it's going to work. I've really tried. And I'm sure Alex has too, in his way, but it's no good. Something's shifted. Do you know how sometimes newspapers print wrong, so that you can see the layers of words and pictures but can't make them out properly? It's like that. We're out of register. Kind of together, but not properly joined up. And I've had two glasses of wine, by the way, and not much food. So . . .”

“What can I do?”

“I don't know. I don't know what you can do. I shouldn't even be speaking to you, should I?”

“That's fine. You know you can speak to me whenever you want. I seem to recall it was you who said you shouldn't—and wouldn't unless it was absolutely necessary. Do you remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. As if I could forget.”

“But you know I'm always here for you, if you need me. Not like that. Not like . . .”

“I know, I know. Not like before.”

“Not like before.” There was a very long pause. “Unless . . .”

“I think I need to see you, Will . . .”

Please don't judge me. OK, whatever—judge away. You'll think what you like and that's fair enough. I've been a domestic criminal in the past, and the worst sort, too: a woman who has slept with her partner's brother. But I've been “clean”—we've been “clean,” Will and I—for ages. Or rather, it had been ages . . . years . . . until we both fell off the wagon. But maybe I should explain. Or perhaps I just
need
to explain. Then you can still judge me, but at least you'll have all the facts. And I don't know why, exactly, but that's important to me: that you know the truth.

It was because of Will—because of what happened between us—that I never allowed myself to marry Alex, despite being engaged, despite him practically begging me to marry. And it's not as if I was raised mired in Catholic guilt or anything, but . . . nobody has the monopoly on guilt, do they? Of course, what I failed to understand, at least until it was too late, was that Alex probably felt I was somehow punishing him, for crimes unknown. I wasn't, though—and that's the truth. I was punishing myself.

And of course the terrible irony is that long before I betrayed Alex—and isn't “betrayed” a truly horrible word?—I had betrayed Will first.

I met Will just over a year before I met Alex. My best friend, Bells, was dating an RAF officer—she always had the proverbial thing for men in uniform, was even briefly engaged to a copper before she saw the light and realized that not all uniforms were equally sexy—and during the three or four months she was seeing Tom she gave a couple of very-much-out-of-her-comfort-zone dinner parties for Tom and a few of his mates.

Bells was (and presumably still is) a lousy cook, so she needed me onside, both practically and emotionally. Originally the plan had been to stow me away in her tiny galley kitchen and keep the guests in the living room and then she could take all the credit for whatever I dished up. My only caveat being that I wasn't going to tell her what I was cooking, so she'd have to wing it—which we both thought was hilarious, because we were twenty-eight. However, my cover was blown when Bells was in the loo having a lip-gloss crisis and a guest suffering a corkscrew crisis wandered into the kitchen.

“Hi, I'm Will. Who the hell are you? And why are you hiding in here?” I'd have made a lousy spy; I confessed immediately, while Will, who thought this mad plan to impress Tom was very funny, decided to play along.

It was a great evening, if a little
Abigail's Party
, and then I was eventually allowed to reveal the truth alongside my strawberry pavlova. All the eight guests thought it was very funny, too—apart it must be said from Tom. In fact, for Bells, our stunt backfired because Tom finished with her a week later, citing “immaturity.” Fortunately
Bells is not a grudge-bearer and shrugged it off with: “He'd already started saying ‘no' to my requests to wear his uniform in bed, so the writing was on the wall. And I think he'd stopped enjoying my—how shall I put this?—insurrections in the ranks and just wanted me to start taking orders.”

So when I told her that Will, who had asked for my number, had called me and that we were going out, she was genuinely pleased.

“Word of warning, Susie: he probably just wants you for your delicious meringues.”

“You are slightly tragically sex-obsessed, Bella, and in a weirdly old-fashioned way. You're the Jilly Cooper heroine who got away.”

“Er, who said anything about sex? I was talking about your fantastic puddings, but if you want to talk about sex, well, let's face it, you do have great tits.”

Twelve years ago I did indeed have “great tits.” I knew this because for about fourteen years prior to this I had had men of pretty much all ages, sizes and racial configurations tell me, over and over, in no uncertain terms. Sometimes this would be in a relatively appropriate and intimate context; at other times it would be while I was standing at a bus stop or queuing in a shop or anywhere in the vicinity of scaffolding. And because I wasn't actually working in porn movies, statistically more often “great tits” would be hissed, shouted, muttered or whispered randomly, in public. Thus my “great tits” were both, depending on my mood, a source of feminine pride or a terrible cross (your heart bra) to bear. But having had my 34E burden since the Lower 4th, becoming the first girl in the year to wear a bra because she had to rather than because she wanted
to, meant I'd long since forgotten a life pre-tits, great or otherwise.

And I really really hated the words “tits.” In fact usage of the word “tits” was effectively a deal-breaker when it came to blokes. If a man really loved me (I'd decided) or even just liked me quite a lot, he'd climb down off his metaphorical scaffolding and call my chest almost anything other than “tits.” Except for “hooters,” obviously, or “fun bags.”

Anyway, it turned out that Will wasn't a “tit” man. Or rather, he was a “tit” man but he always referred to them as “breasts,” which meant I sort of loved him straight away. Not that he was talking about my “breasts” straight away, obviously—but when he was eventually introduced to them it was clear he respected them, which in turn meant that he respected me, which also meant he was probably a Gent. And when I was twenty-eight I hadn't met too many Gents who weren't either my dad or my dad's friends. And actually, several of my dad's friends had struck me as definite “tit” types—but I digress.

Will says he asked me out because I “made him laugh.” Which is obviously better than “because you have great tits,” but almost as predictable. When it came to chalk versus cheese we were, quite obviously, the White Cliffs versus Pule (it's a Serbian donkey cheese that costs £1,000 a kilo, though you'd have to pay me more than that to eat it). Verily the definition of opposites attracting, at the time we met Will was a widowed RAF officer of thirty-six with a seven-year-old son, whose disparate list of recreations included fly-fishing, contemporary American literature and tinkering with his classic pillar-box-red 1974 Jensen Healey (apparently a kind of car). I, on the other hand, was a flighty twenty-eight-year-old singleton, living in a flatshare in Crouch End and working as
features editor on the newly launched
Fine Dining
magazine, whose recreations included becoming tired and emotional in so many of the capital's clubs and bars that, sometime around 1995, against a backdrop of Blur and Oasis, Bella had nicknamed me “the carpet inspector.”