The Adultery Club (33 page)

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.”

Defiantly, Evie scrubs at her face with the starched antimacassar. “I want to watch
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. I brought my new DVD—”

“Duh! Grandma doesn’t have a DVD player.”

“We’ve got one at home,” Evie whines. “Why can’t we go back home and watch it? Why do we have to come here anyway?”

I sigh. “It’s complicated—”

Abruptly, Sophie leaps to her feet. “Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, stupid! He’s not coming home! Ever, ever,
ever
! They’re getting a divorce, don’t you know
anything?”

“Sophie, nobody said anything about—”

She turns on me, her eyes large and frightened in her angry, pale face. “You
are!
You’re going to get divorced and marry someone else and she’ll have babies and you’ll love them more than us, you won’t want to see us anymore, you’ll forget all about us and love
them
instead!”

I stare after her as she slams out of the room. Guilt makes a fist of my intestines. And I know from bitter vicarious experience that this is just the start of it.

When Sara telephones at teatime, and suggests coming down and taking the girls out to Chessington with me on Sunday, I fall upon the idea. My mother is clearly in no fit state to cope with the children at the moment, particularly when they are acting up like this, and I certainly don’t have a better idea. I have never had to fill an entire weekend with artificial activity and entertainment for three small children before. I have no idea what to
do
with them. Weekends have always just
happened
. A spot of tidying up while Mal goes to Tesco’s, changing lightbulbs and fixing broken toys. Mowing the lawn. A game of rounders now and then; teaching the girls to ride their bikes. Slumping amid a sea of newspapers after Sunday lunch while the girls play dressing-up in their rooms.

I love my daughters; of course I do. But conversation with children of eighteen months, six, and nearly nine is limited, at best. In the normal course of events, we are either active in each other’s company—playing French cricket, for example—or each doing our own thing in separate parts of the house. Available to each other, but not
foisted
. Not trapped in a cluttered house of mourning in Esher without even the rabbit’s misdemeanors for petty distraction.

For the first time, I realize that access and family life are not even remotely related.

Clearly Mal isn’t scrupling to introduce our daughters to her “friend.” And they may actually
like
Sara. Relate to her, even. In time, perhaps, she could become more of a big sister than anything else—

“I
hate
her!” Sophie screams the moment she sees Sara getting out of her car the next morning.

“Sophie, you’ve never even
met
her.”

She throws herself at the lamppost at the end of my parents’ drive and sits on the filthy pavement, knotting her arms and legs about it as if anticipating being bodily wrestled into the car. “No! You can’t make me go with her!”

“Sophie, you’re being ridiculous! Sara’s a very nice—”

“She broke up our family!” Sophie cries. “She’s a
homewrecker!
”

I stare at her in shock. I can’t believe I’m hearing such tabloid verbiage from my eight-year-old daughter. “Who told you
that?”

“I heard Mummy talking to Uncle Kit on the phone! She was
crying!
Real, proper tears, like when Grandpa died! Her face was all red like Metheny’s and she had stuff coming out of her nose and everything! And she told Uncle Kit,” she hiccups, “it’s all
her
fault!”

Involuntarily, I glance at Sara.

“Please
, darling. Let go of the lamppost. The entire street is looking at you.”

Sophie pretzels herself even tighter. “I don’t care!”

My arms twitch helplessly.

“Why are you being so difficult? Sara is trying to be
nice
to you. Chessington was
her
idea.”

“So what! It’s a stupid idea!”

Evie climbs into the back of our car and sticks her head out of the window. “We could always push her off the rollercoaster,”
she suggests cheerfully. “She’ll splat like strawberry jam on the ground and the ambulance men will have to use spades to scrape her off. We could put the bits in a jar and keep it next to Don Juan’s cage—”

“Evie, that’s enough!”

“Why don’t you sit in the front with Daddy?” Sara says nicely to Sophie. “I’m just along for the ride, anyway.”

“You’ll get carsick,” Evie says, pleased.

“If I was going to cling onto something,” Sara whispers loudly to Evie as she gets in beside her, “it wouldn’t be to a
lamppost
. Dogs love lampposts. Just
think
what you might be sitting on.”

Sophie quickly lets go and stands up. She pulls up her pink Bratz T-shirt and wipes her damp face on the hem. “I’m not sitting next to
her
, even if we go on a scary ride. I’m not even going to talk to her.”

“Fine. I don’t suppose she wants to talk to you much either, after that little display.”

“She’ll get cold,” Sophie warns, ruinously scraping the tops of her shoes on the pavement as she dawdles toward the car, “in that stupid little top. She’ll probably get pneumonia and die.”

“Seat belt, Sophie.”

She slams home the buckle.
“She
can’t tell us what to do. She’s not our mother, anyway. She’s not anybody’s mother.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Sara says briskly. “I don’t like children.”

Evie gasps.

“Not
any
children?” Sophie demands, shocked by this heresy into forgetting her vow of omertà.

“Nope.”

“Not even babies?”

“Babies most of all.”

“Metheny
can
be a pain,” Evie acknowledges, regarding her sister, who is sleeping peaceably in her car seat, with a baleful glare. “Especially when she pukes. She does that a
lot.”

“Don’t you like
us?”
Sophie asks, twisting round.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Sara says thoughtfully. “I like some people, and I don’t like others. It doesn’t really matter to me how old they are. You wouldn’t say you loved everyone who had red hair or brown eyes, would you? So why should you like everyone who just happens to be four?”

“Or six,” says Evie.

“Or six. I just make up my mind as I go along.”

“You’re weird,” Sophie sniffs, but her voice has lost its edge.

I glance in the rearview mirror. Sara smiles, and the tension knotting my shoulders eases just a little. Clearly my intention to present her as a friend was arrantly naïve; certainly as far as the precocious Sophie is concerned. I must discuss how much she knows with Mal as soon as possible. But I could not have maintained the subterfuge of remaining at their grandmother’s in order to console her for very much longer in any event. Perhaps it’s better to have the truth out in the open now. Rip off the sticking plaster in one go, rather than pull it from the wound of our separation inch by painful inch.

Children are remarkably resilient. And forgiving. As Sara and Evie debate the relative merits of contestants on some reality talent show, I even dare to hope that today may turn out to be better than I had expected.

My nascent optimism, however, is swiftly quenched. Before we have even reached the motorway, Metheny wakes up and starts to scream for her mother, Evie and Sophie descend into another spate of vicious bickering over their
comic books, and I am forced to stop the car in a lay-by so that Sara may be, as predicted, carsick.

I turn off the engine. We had a Croatian au pair one summer: sick every time she got in the car. Couldn’t even manage the bloody school run. Fine on the back of her damn boyfriend’s bike, though.

As Sara returns from the bushes, there comes the unmistakable sound of my baby daughter thoroughly filling her nappy.

Naturally, I have forgotten the changing bag. And naturally again, we are far from any kind of habitation where I might purchase anything with which to rectify the situation.

I unbuckle Metheny and lay her on the backseat with some distaste, wondering what in God’s name I do now. Clearly I cannot leave her like this: Mustard-colored shit is oozing through the seams of her all-in-one. I struggle not to retch. We’re at least half an hour from anywhere. Jesus Christ. How can a person this small and beautiful produce substances noxious enough to fell an army SWAT team at a thousand paces?

I look around helplessly. The car rocks alarmingly as vehicles shoot past at what seem like incredible speeds from our stationary standpoint. It isn’t that I’m not versed in changing foul nappies; I have handled several bastards, in fact, from each of my daughters. But not unequipped. Not without cream and wipes and basins of hot water and changes of fresh clothes.

Metheny’s screams redouble. There’s no help for it; I will have to clean her up as best I can and wrap her in my jacket. I offer a silent prayer that we reach civilization before her bowels release a second load into my Savile Row tailoring.

Sophie watches me struggle for ten minutes with a packet of tissues from Sara’s handbag and copious quantities of spit,
before informing me that her mother always keeps a spare nappy, a packet of wet wipes, and a full change of baby clothes beneath the first-aid kit in the boot.