The Playdate (7 page)

She opened the fridge, suddenly excited about planning the evening. Asparagus fought for space with strawberries at the top of the fridge. There were a couple of steaks on the middle shelf and two bottles of white wine. Good.

All she had to do was get the kids to bed early, have a bath . . .

Jez wandered into the kitchen, his head turned backward to listen to something Henry was shouting from upstairs. Suzy glanced at his face as she went to fill the coffeepot.

Wait a second. What was that?

She looked back.

Jez’s head was fixed at an upward angle as he answered Henry’s question about something to do with planets. There. There it was. Where the dip of his cheek normally was, a new layer of flesh subtly flattened out the contour.

Was he becoming heavier around the face? When did that happen?

Her eyes scanned his body quickly for more evidence, and settled on his stomach. He had always been big, but there, too, there was a change. His shirt pushed a little ahead of his jacket.

Suzy watched, amazed. How had she not noticed before? It wasn’t that surprising, perhaps. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her husband naked.

As he turned and walked toward her she saw it more clearly. There. Under his chin. A slight curve. It made him look older; gave him a vulnerable look.

The idea of an old Jez was comforting. He would need her then.

“Hey, hon,” she said in her gentlest voice. “Come here—please.”

Jez put down his phone and walked over to her, glancing at the boys.

“What?” he murmured.

She reached up and put her arms around his neck, pulling him lightly toward her, feeling no tension this time. Just the velvet heat of his neck connecting with hers. At the touch of his skin, a tremor ran through her at what might happen later. It made her involuntarily flex her body toward him.

“What do you want to do tonight?” she whispered.

“That was Don,” Jez murmured back in her ear. “His boss at the bank is throwing a party tonight out in Hertfordshire. He reckons I could make a few contacts. The guy’s invited us to stay over and play golf tomorrow.”

She held him close, finally allowing herself to recognize the familiar hard tension in the muscles beneath his skin. It had never gone away; the wine had just softened his resolve to push her away again. Instead, he was standing patiently in her arms, waiting for her to let go. So he could leave again.

Lunch hadn’t been for her. It had been for the boys.

“OK, hon,” she said, lowering her eyes. “If you think that’s a good idea. Can you pour the coffee? I’m going to use the bathroom.”

Her cheeks burning, she fought her way blindly up the stairs and into her room, shutting the door behind her.

She sat down on the bed—the bed that she had slept in alone last night while Jez lay drunkenly on the sofa downstairs. No fetal position for her husband. She’d found him this morning on his back, snoring, his arms splayed out, like the king.

Be strong, she told herself. Be strong. Do not give him an easy excuse to leave.

Time was running out. First she had to make Nora happen. Nora would make everything all right. A daughter would soften him. A cute little girl would crack through that armor.

And, in the meantime, she would just have to do everything
she could to prepare for the worst. Jez’s father already looked at her like she was a bad smell. Just think what he could ask his old boys’ club friends to do to her in the divorce courts.

No—she needed evidence, just in case Jez did leave, so she could protect her babies.

Suzy took out her own mobile and finally did what she had been putting off doing all day. She dialed a number.

9
Callie

“If I do this, it feels like I’m in an airplane.”

Rae stands on a bollard in the ice-rink car park, her arms spread wide, pushing her face into the wind.

From this angle, we could be standing on a cliff edge. Below us lies London, six miles away, the London Eye and Gherkin tiny miniatures from this distance.

It was Rae’s idea to come up to Ally Pally this evening. It’s her favorite place. She almost squeals with delight as she does her carefully paced half run that I have taught her, along the stone terrace in front of the palace. I worry that it’s a little late to be up here. Saturday night is when families visiting the ice rink and duck pond go home and groups of kids take their place in the empty car park, leaning with their dogs against the gerbil-cage runs of fire escapes that cover the side of the palace, eyeing up anyone who walks past, with loud music bursting from battered cars. But it is still light enough to feel safe. A pretty silver sky hovers above.

I walk behind Rae, watching her, as always. She dashes in and out of the Victorian lampposts and walkways that run along the front of the palace’s honeyed-brick facade, counting the lion gargoyles on its walls. At a pair of blue doors, tall enough for a giant, she begs me to lift her up to look through the portal windows at the Great Hall that lies empty behind. In some places there is nothing behind. The great arched windows stand alone, like a film set, birds fluttering through them, the palace’s innards long ago ravaged by fire. All front, with nothing behind. Everything behind destroyed by one catastrophic event.

“Can I look through that, Mum?” she shouts, pointing at a telescope.

Normally, she knows we can’t afford to waste fifty pence on such trivia, but today is special. I sit on the wall beside her and look around.

Children go skidding by on scooters, screaming, followed by their parents. A black crow flies off the steps and soars over the parkland below.

My wall. Our wall that we have sat on a hundred times.

As Rae turns the telescope one way, then the other, that month when we moved here from Tufnell Park comes back to me.

It’s funny. I didn’t even know the palace existed then. I stumbled upon it by accident at first, of course, not realizing it was actually a building, not just a park. After an afternoon of following steep pavements uphill with Rae’s stroller, trying to walk off the pain of splitting with Tom, I gasped my way up to the top—and there it was. This beautiful old shell of a palace, overlooking the city below. From then on, each day I’d wait as long as I could before the walls of my flat closed in on me and then I’d burst out of the door like a free-diver coming up for air. I’d push the stroller up here and sit for an hour, Rae wrapped up
warmly. Not that it took away the loneliness. Even when training athletes sprinted up the near-vertical hills toward me, blowing hard through shiny cheeks, and large groups in turbans and veils strolled past me showing their visiting families this view of the city, I felt more by myself than I ever had in my life, up here. I’d look out at the famous landmark buildings, so far in the distance I might as well be back on the farm in Lincolnshire dreaming about them.

“Mum?”

I look up to see Rae struggling with the weight of the telescope, blinking hard to focus.

“Here,” I say, standing up to help.

“You see that building that looks like a big rod,” I say, moving the telescope toward the west and holding it for her. “That’s the Post Office Tower.”

“Mmm . . .”

“That’s near where I’ll be on Monday, so not far away.”

I say it to reassure her, but the truth is, I can’t quite believe it myself: that on Monday, I will be back in the city.

Rae shrugs. She jumps down and we sit back on the wall.

“Hannah and me played sunbathing at school. We lied on the ground and pretended to put our sunglasses on.”

“Did you?” I smile. “What, yesterday, when it was sunny?”

“No, the day after yesterday,” she says.

I laugh out loud. She sounds like Tom with his back-to-front time lines. Rae looks up at me, confused. She joins in anyway, pleased she has made a joke. I watch her. It’s a shame not many people see Rae laugh. She has a dirty laugh, like Muttley the dog, pushing the air through her teeth with a
shee shee shee
noise. I put my arm round her and pull her close.

“And where was Henry?”

“He was in Mr. McGregor’s office because he hit Luke,” she says.

“Really?” I say. I am so glad Rae is starting to make other friends. Now, she and I are both trying. It’s funny that Suzy didn’t tell me about Henry, though.

“Does he hit you?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Henry says he is going to marry me.”

*     *     *

We pick up our Saturday night chips on the way home and walk along the peaceful avenues, sharing them. It becomes so quiet around here in the evenings. Curtains shut. Children stop crying. Dogs stop barking. The dusky summer evening is lit by a trail of little outdoor lamps that people have beside their front doors to help them see their keys and welcome visitors.

When we reach our flat, there is no welcoming light. Our landlord did not install one and I have no power to do so myself. Not that we have many visitors to welcome, anyway.

I hurry Rae through the door, trying not to think about it.

Rae runs to her bedroom without being asked. Every week, it seems, she becomes capable of doing something new and more difficult; things that Tom and I thought she might never do. She puts on her own seat belt in the car now. This morning she took food from the shelves in the supermarket and put it in the cart. Tonight, she wants to do her favorite new job of getting herself ready for bed, while I pour myself a glass of wine from the second of the two nice bottles I managed to buy on sale earlier, one for the woman across the road, and one for Suzy coming over later.

“Mum, I’m ready!” Rae shouts from her bedroom. I walk in to find her sitting up in bed, her fairy lights already switched
on, her favorite Dr. Seuss book ready to read on the duvet cover Suzy bought her for Christmas that is covered in embroidered princesses. Rae looks at me defiantly. She is wearing one of Tom’s T-shirts again, her curls tumbling down across it. She has a drawer full of pajamas and nighties but insists on rifling through his shelves every time she stays at his flat in Tufnell Park. Tonight she sports an old red Clash T-shirt that droops off her shoulders. I flinch momentarily at the sight of Paul Simonon smashing a bass on her tiny body. A memory of Tom wearing it at a gig in Camden comes back to me. Of his body inside it, hot and damp from dancing in the packed venue. Of him looking at me with those sleepy, relaxed eyes, then pulling me into his arms, where I rested my lips on the sun-bleached down of his skin, safe from the squash of the crowd.

I’ve been trying to persuade Rae to wear something warm at night but can see from her face that she is determined. So I can’t help it. I lean forward and bury my face in the T-shirt, just for a second, just to remember. Rae kisses my head, and holds on to it for a second.

“Love you,” I say, kissing her back, and turn off her main light.

She turns over and is asleep before I leave the room.

*     *     *

Saturday nights are the worst.

Once, before Rae, they were the nights to look forward to, after a day of sleeping off our long workweek. Like vampires, Tom and I would emerge at dusk from a mess of warm sheets and newspapers and legs, to head out to Islington or Soho or Camden, depending on whose friends were going where. A few hours was all Tom needed. Then the energy levels that sustained
him through the most tortuous of weeklong shoots would soar sky-high again. He’d herd me and everyone else into the long hours of a night that could just as easily end up in a club in Camberwell as on the beach in Brighton. You never knew with Tom. All you knew was that the week was finished, if he had his way. Finished, celebrated, drunk over, joked about, yelled at, laughed at, then discarded; ready for a new dawn on Monday.

Now I dread Saturday nights. I dread them.

I look out of my window. There is nothing about Churchill Road tonight that says it is any different from Friday night or, say, Monday night. I just know it’s different. I know that behind those curtains, couples are sitting on the sofa, shoulders and legs touching, sipping wine, watching a DVD box set; other people have already headed out for a night with friends in a city that I have always loved but no longer know.

In desperation once, when Tom had Rae one weekend, I even suggested to Suzy that we go into Soho on Saturday for a drink. But she said she couldn’t leave Jez on his own with the kids and that she wouldn’t trust a stranger to babysit them, either. So it never happened.

I walk around my flat impatiently.

Where on earth is Suzy? She was due at 9
P.M.,
and now it is 9:40.

I am on my second glass of wine. I sip it again, too fast.

It is Suzy’s reaction to my news that I have worried about the most this week. Because we both know that I will be leaving her alone. I never asked her to ignore the school parents who have so pointedly turned their backs on me. Yet she did it anyway. So now, because of me, there will be no one for her to roller-skate with or swim with or talk to over coffee in this lonely corner of the city during those weekdays that stretch into infinity.

The thing is, I remember how it feels.

Suzy once told me, shortly after they moved in, that Jez thought he might have made a mistake basing his communications consultancy back in London. At the time, Rae and I were at Northmore every few weeks for checkups after her second op, the big one, before she started school. The thought of knowing I might have to return from the brittle stink of hospital without Suzy’s new but already welcoming arms across the road sent me into a night of anxiety dreams that my desperately welcome new friend had already left, her house replaced by a fish-and-chip shop.

I check the clock again: 9:41
P.M.
Where is she? Putting down my wine, I walk into my bedroom to look through my wardrobe in the vain hope I’ll find something to wear to work on Monday. Ruefully, I recall hacking through it one afternoon years ago, after the news came that Guy could no longer extend my endless maternity leave. Sartorial self-harm, if you like. By the time I had tearfully bundled my carefully chosen work clothes onto the bed for eBay there were just folded piles left: T-shirts, jeans, jumpers, and a padded coat. Not much good in a Soho design studio where image is everything. Great for the play park.