The Playdate (24 page)
I only mean to sit on the bed for a minute. But I can’t move somehow. It’s nice just to rest for a moment, and let my arms fall heavy and still while Tom deals with Rae. Apart from the soft footsteps of the couple upstairs on my ceiling, there is silence, just the murmuring from Rae’s bedroom where Tom reads Dr. Seuss. Just a minute more, I keep thinking. Then I’ll get up.
“I’ll be over tomorrow to see you, babe,” I hear Tom say twenty minutes later. I jerk upright, realizing I have nearly been asleep. I walk into Rae’s room and find him leaning over her bed to kiss her good night, looking like a giant in the tiny room. A giant who used to protect us but who isn’t there anymore. He protects Kate now.
He turns to look at me and the soft glow of the fairy lights takes me back to the first time I saw him, when he walked into Sophie’s birthday party in our garden in Islington in the dusk with one of her old college friends, and sat round the bonfire we made in a trash can and chatted to Sophie’s visiting mum, whom everyone else was politely ignoring. And I remember how I’d had a bad week, and how as the evening went on his eyes kept straying over to me. How he made stupid faces across the garden, and it cheered me up a little. Then how he followed me into the kitchen, to find me, bum in the air, trying to reach my mobile phone, which I had dropped down the back of a radiator.
“Here, let me.” He smiled, reaching down to get it.
“Thanks,” I said coyly, reaching out for it.
“Yeah, right,” he said, holding it above his head and walking off, leaving me confused.
“Er, can I have my phone back, please?” I asked later, when I found him lying on the grass smoking a joint under the stars.
“You’ll have to tell me why the sad face first,” he murmured, holding it up high again, while exhaling white smoke into the dark air, with these unruly white curls and blue eyes that dared me. And then I was reaching over, and smelling the soapy warmth of his skin, and feeling the breath of his laugh in my ear.
“I am going to marry that John,” I told Sophie later, drunkenly lying on her bed.
“Tom,” she murmured, removing her makeup.
And six months later, on that precious weekend to New York, at City Hall, with one hand on the bump that was already Rae, that’s exactly what I did.
“We need to speak to the police about that woman,” Tom
says, following me out of Rae’s room, the humor from that night in Islington long gone. “What have they done about it?”
“I’m going to find out tomorrow,” I say. “You know, I’ve been thinking. It might just have been an accident. Rae was probably upset about her playdate being canceled. It might have happened even if I had been there. We need to talk to her about it.”
He shakes his head. “When she’s ready. But there’s something not right about that woman. I want it sorted out.”
He turns to say good-bye, and in the bright light of the hall his face looks pained and worn and tired. I realize that he feels it, too. He blames himself for Rae, too. He wasn’t there, either.
* * *
I unlock the back door in the kitchen, and let Tom out through our scrubby little rear garden and back gate to the lane where his car is parked. I shut the door again, and stand in the kitchen, listening for his car to go.
I wait there for a while.
Then I remember I must redo the bolt on the garden gate after him. But before I can move, there is a knock on the back door.
I open it. My face gives it away.
Sometimes this happens. Sometimes, for months at a time, things between us are just normal and perfunctory, practical and functional, as they have to be. Then sometimes, there is a look.
He stands in the doorway, his large frame filling it. Without saying anything, he walks toward me and shuts the back door behind him.
I know what’s going to happen.
I walk ahead of him toward the hall in case I am wrong
but he catches my hand and turns me round. I breathe a long, hard breath, followed by another. He looks down at me, his lids heavy, maneuvers me into the wall, and pushes my skirt up. Trailing his hand up my thigh, he hooks one finger around the elastic of my panties and pulls it, looking at me with eyes that have already gone.
“Take them off.”
We both know that this will be quick. No rosy-colored, soft-focus, romantic lovemaking for us. This is about something else.
I remove them.
“And this . . .” he murmurs, motioning to my bra.
I put my hands behind my back and undo the strap, feeling the weight of my breasts moving forward as he lifts my top and pulls away the bra with one finger. I am breathing so fast I think I might faint. He sighs and rubs the flat of his hand across me till I moan, then lifts me up onto the table. He uses his knee to part mine.
The noise that comes from my lips next is a noise only he hears.
I know she’s there, waiting for him to come back. But this is my child’s father. And I know it’s terrible. But sometimes, when everything gets too much, when I can’t take the weight of all this responsibility, of all these mistakes I have made, of all this guilt, I need someone to take charge, just for a moment.
Still no Jez.
Suzy arrived home from the park with the kids just before 7
P.M.
to find an empty hallway. Had she done the right thing?
He had left at seven this morning for his digital technology conference in Birmingham. The second he had left, she had rung Vondra and asked her to run to Euston train station. A woman with a mission, Vondra had heroically made it onto the next train and followed him up north.
Her first report came in three hours later: Jez was at the conference. Sasha was there, too. Her second report was more reassuring: Jez and two male colleagues had eaten lunch at an Italian bistro close to the venue, with Sasha nowhere in sight, then returned to the conference at 3
P.M.
Everything seemed aboveboard.
“You better come back, then,” Suzy had said. Vondra was expensive. There were only so many purchases of kids’ shoes or car services she could fake before Jez became suspicious about where his money was going.
Yet now, as Suzy put the kids in the bath, she wondered if she had made a mistake. The conference finished at 4
P.M.,
according to Vondra. He should have been back at Euston by 6
P.M.
Now it was 7
P.M.
and he wasn’t answering his phone.
Vondra was right. It was always better to know when he was lying than suffer this agonizing guessing. Not only did it reassure her that she was not going mad—and that those anxious, sleepless hours were of his making, not hers—it was also building evidence that would keep her babies safe if he ever did take her to a divorce court. More than once, she had imagined his face as her lawyer read out the proof of his infidelity.
As for the pain it caused her, well, she was learning to deal with that. If, for a second, she let herself imagine Jez with Sasha, his head tipped back, breathing heavily, Sasha’s glossy brunette hair scattered around his thighs, she would jump up and move around quickly, finding tasks to do that distracted her from the nauseous sensation in her stomach.
Her main problem right now was keeping her evidence of his deception a secret from him. At times, the urge to blurt it all out and watch his face was overwhelming.
Last night, for instance, as they finally sat down to dinner together after visiting Callie in the hospital.
“So, what was the banker guy’s house like?” she said.
“Hmm?” he said, watching the news on the telly on the wall.
“In Hertfordshire. Is he loaded—was it a mansion?”
“It was OK. Big.”
“Did it have a pool?”
“Um—yeah, I think so.”
“Indoor or outdoor?”
“Can’t remember. Why?”
She could have gone on, of course. What food did they
give their guests? Did they have caterers? How old was the banker’s wife?
But Jez was smarter than that. And she wasn’t giving up.
Not when there was a chance. So she had made herself stand up and walk to the kitchen on the pretense of fetching more water, and checked the calendar. Day fifteen. She might still be ovulating. Last night, after the hospital, she had tried again, after Tuesday night’s dismal failure to seduce him. But he had gone to bed when she was in the bath and appeared to have fallen asleep before she climbed into bed in her new camisole. At least when he was asleep she could lie close beside him and feel his warmth against her. It helped, but it wasn’t enough. Tonight she would have to be cleverer.
Suzy hung up the kids’ coats in the hall and put on a DVD for them in the kitchen, promising herself she’d implement the normal rules again next week when her head was clearer.
She took off her own shoes and sat down on the floor in front of the telly, lifting Peter onto her knee and wrapping her arms round his warm, soft tummy. Henry shuffled over to lean his head into her shoulder, his hand resting unthinkingly on hers. Otto came, too, sitting up on the sofa behind her, with his chubby little feet dangling by either side of her head, thumb in his mouth.
Cocooned by the boys, Suzy let herself relax. The room felt warm and cozy from the earlier sunshine. No. Nothing was over yet. If she stayed strong, this thing with Jez might pass. “Lots of men go through something like this when the kids are small,” Vondra had told her when they first met. “I like to keep in touch with my ladies, and you’d be surprised how many say it was just a phase. That he needed the woman and was jealous of the kids.”
So, who knows? Maybe Jez’s train was just late. Next door, Suzy heard a door bang. Probably Debs’s odd little husband going out. Who could blame him?
A vision of Callie and Rae came into her head. Had his wife even spoken to Callie yet?
Kissing the boys, Suzy stood up and left the kitchen. She picked up the phone and climbed up to sit on the fourth stair. She punched in a number and waited. A second later, she heard a faint ringing through the wall.
The phone in her hand rang out, five or six times.
Suddenly, Suzy’s letterbox flew open.
“I can see you! I can SEE you!” a woman called through the metal slit. It took her a second to realize it was the woman from next door, peering through with her black-framed glasses.
“Hey. What the hell are you doing?” Suzy shouted, slamming down her phone.
The boys appeared in the hall behind her, one by one, with big, fascinated eyes.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Henry said.
“You’re calling my house!” Debs stuttered. “Over and over. Trying to upset me. I will not put up with it. I had enough of it in Hackney and I will not put up with it now!”
“You what . . . ?” Suzy said. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m calling my husband. You’re crazy. You’re scaring my kids.”
“But I can see what you’re doing!” Debs called tearfully. “Phoning me. Putting the phone down when you hear my footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs.” Her voice reached a high-pitched squeak. “Why on earth are you doing this to me? Did the Poplar boy get you to do this to me?”
Suzy stared at her with wide eyes. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but there is clearly something not right with you. You’re right—
I did try to ring you earlier to ask you to ring Callie because she was getting upset that you hadn’t been in touch—and I don’t blame her. Now, I just told you, you’re scaring my kids . . . Jeez, and after what you’ve just done to Callie’s little girl? Now go, or I’ll call the police. I mean it.”
The woman from next door seemed to freeze. She let out a muffled gasp.
“I mean it!” Suzy said, getting up and flinging her front door open. “Get away from my kids! Now!”
The woman stood in front of her. “I did nothing to that Poplar girl!” she cried. “She just twisted it around so that people would think . . .”
Just that second, her husband came out of the house next door holding a phone handset.
“There you are, love. British Gas is on the phone about our new account,” he said.
Suzy shook her head slowly. The woman stopped speaking and looked completely bewildered. “But I know it was her,” she whined, pointing at Suzy. “I know it was. Maybe the boy didn’t say anything, but maybe she read about it in the newspaper?”
Suzy looked at the husband. His jaw was set firmly.
“Sir, you need to take your wife inside,” she said as calmly as she could so as not to frighten the children. “She clearly needs help.”
* * *
The adrenaline was still pumping through her twenty minutes later. Suzy went into autopilot, putting the kids to bed without a bath, desperate to get across the road to tell Callie.
“Was that lady going to hurt you, Mommy?” Henry asked, curling up to go to sleep.
“No, hon, she’s just not very well. You know how Rae has hurt her knee? Well, that lady is hurt in her head. But don’t worry, Mommy told her to go away and she won’t come back now. She won’t hurt you or Rae.”
As soon as they were all asleep she ran around the house, making sure everything was turned off. She checked the clock: 7:50
P.M.
Jez could be back anytime but she’d take a chance he was out for the night now. She chewed her lip. She hated doing it, but sometimes there was no choice. This wasn’t like running away from your children in the park. She’d only be across the road and could hear everything.
Ringing her own landline with her mobile, Suzy answered it and laid the handset on the upstairs hall outside the kids’ rooms, beside their open doors, then took her mobile with her out the front door, shutting it gently.
Checking to see that the woman wasn’t outside, she ran across the road and banged on Callie’s door. When there was no answer she rang the bell twice, remembering at the last moment not to wake Rae up.
“Damn,” she muttered.
Callie opened the door. She looked flustered, and was wearing a bathrobe. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling, like she’d just got out of the bath.
She saw Suzy’s face. “What?”