The Playdate (8 page)
Mentally, I calculate how much Dad sent me for Rae’s swimming lessons. I could spend that tomorrow at Brent Cross shopping center on something to wear, then pay it back out of my first paycheck. Is that a bad thing to do?
The thought of going back to Guy’s studio on Monday sends my stomach into a roller-coaster plunge.
The intercom buzzes. Suzy. Thank goodness. I push the thought from my mind and open the door.
“Hey, hon. I can’t stay long,” she says, breezing in. “Jez just put Peter to bed without his eczema cream.”
“Oh no—call the police,” I say, following her back into the kitchen.
She pretend-punches my arm. “Shut up.”
“Glass of wine?” I say.
She nods, motioning a half glass. Moving around the kitchen, my body is tense and upright in anticipation of its difficult duty.
“So . . .” she says, checking her mobile distractedly. “What’s up?”
“Suze,” I say, handing the glass to her. “I’m really sorry—there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for days . . .”
She looks alarmed.
I take a breath. “I’m going back to work—on Monday. At my old studio.”
She shrugs slightly, and puts her hand over her mouth. It slides farther up over her eyes.
“Sorry . . .” I say, wrinkling up my face. “I just have to.”
Suddenly I hear her sniff.
What is she doing?
She sniffs again.
“Suze!” I exclaim. “It’s just a three-week project to start with to see if I can still do it, and I’ll be round at the weekend and . . .”
She lifts her face. It takes me a horrible second to realize she is smiling.
“I know—you bitch,” she says, pretending to hit me on the arm again. “The woman next door told me.”
She rolls her eyes with comedy effect to emphasize how bad this is.
I already know.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I told her.”
“Hey,” she says, “don’t worry about it. I think it’s great.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. I thought you seemed a little down. But what about Rae?”
“She’s going to after-school club.”
“Really? What does Tom say about that?”
I grimace. “What do you think?”
“You want me to keep an eye on her?” she says.
She, more than anyone, knows how hard it is for me to leave Rae.
“Thanks,” I say, putting down my wineglass and hugging her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I try to ignore the hypocrisy of my own words.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” she says. Even though she’s been here for more than two years, Suzy has never stopped replying like an American to each and every thank-you she receives, and sometimes I want to tell her to stop, but I don’t. “I know you’d do it for me.”
For some reason, I can’t leave it there. I feel I owe Suzy something back. I have to meddle.
“Do you ever think about doing something else now that the kids are at nursery—working, or studying or something?”
I realize I can’t remember what Suzy did before kids. I think she met Jez when she was temping in an office that he was contracting for in Denver.
Her expression shifts.
“No,” she says. “Oh my God, no. Really. I just want to be there for my kids, Cal. It’s important to me.”
A picture of Rae pops into my head: she is coming out of class on Monday, not into my arms, but to the back of the queue of exhausted kids led off by the after-school club teacher to yet another stuffy room full of more chaotic noise and childhood
germs, where they will wait till tight-jawed parents dash from the Tube to grab them at 6
P.M.
“Listen, don’t worry about me—here’s to you,” Suzy says, lifting her glass. “Good luck. You know I’ll miss you.”
All of a sudden, I don’t want my wine. She looks at me quizzically.
“What’s up? Are you nervous about going back?”
“Incredibly,” I say. I am actually feeling hurt but I’m not sure why.
She looks at her phone screen.
“Oh, hell,” she says.
Jez probably can’t find the nappies. Four minutes, I calculate. That must be a record. The bottle of wine sits on the countertop, not even half-drunk.
“Got to go,” she says. “Listen, just ring me if you’re worried. And, hey, don’t be nervous, I know you’ll be brilliant.”
No, you don’t, I think. You have no idea whether I’ll be brilliant or not because we’ve never really spoken about my job. I am not sure that you even know what a sound designer does and you certainly don’t know what it took me to become one. Because you’ve never asked.
But I hug her anyway, knowing I should be grateful that she cares enough to say it.
As she leaves she turns.
“What was she like?”
“Who?”
“The woman next door.”
“Really nice, actually. She gave Rae a little toy when we went round, which I’ll tell you about another time. And I’m going to borrow a book from her; she has hundreds,” I say.
“Maybe I should invite her in for coffee,” Suzy murmurs.
“I see—gone five minutes and you’re already replacing me,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.
“You think she likes spas?” she says, doing a giant comedy wink. If I did that I’d look stupid. When Suzy does it she looks like a model in a
Vogue
spread, all elfin blond bob, long pale lashes, and sexy full lips.
I stay on the doorstep watching her.
A strange sensation comes over me. I feel the way people describe feeling when they sense their loved one’s plane is going to crash. As Suzy lifts her foot off the road and onto her side of the pavement I have an urge to shout at her that I won’t go to work. That we’ll go to the Sanctuary next week after all, and lie on our fronts having sandalwood and lotus oil rubbed into our skin.
But I don’t.
Because I have to let her go, just a little. It is time.
So I stay fixed to the spot as she enters her gate. The front door opens and she is gone.
I look up. The silver sky has oxidized into black. A breeze makes me shiver. The weather forecast said rain was coming.
Suzy opened the door of her house and walked in. As soon as she shut it behind her, her shoulders slumped and she pulled her cardigan round herself.
So it wasn’t a mistake. A ball of pressure shot up inside her chest like a high-speed elevator. She held her breath for a second, trying to contain it. There was no noise.
Tiptoeing upstairs so as not to wake the children, she passed the blown-up studio photo of her three boys hanging on the wall. Ruefully, she turned away. Just the other day her new cleaner, Clara, had mentioned how nice the photo was. Suzy had nodded, keeping the truth firmly to herself: that Henry’s grinning face had been Photoshopped onto his body from the last of fifty shots after he’d screamed in all the others because Jez hadn’t turned up at the studio. Traffic, Jez claimed. She hadn’t been so sure. She knew he’d hated the idea anyway. “Bit tacky, isn’t it?” he’d grumbled when she told him she’d booked the session. So instead of the five of them, there were just three. Of
course, she could have been in the photo, too, but the image of a single mother with three boys was tempting fate too much. If you looked closely you could see the swollen redness of Henry’s cheeks above a smile paid for with a bar of chocolate the photographer had brought out of a drawer without asking her, clearly having reached the limit of his patience.
Suzy reached the top of the stairs, picked up the cordless phone she had left by the open doors of the boys’ bedrooms, and pressed the “end call” button, immediately terminating the call to her mobile. She turned that off, too, and quickly checked the sleeping bodies. The faint cry she had heard on her mobile at Callie’s must have been one of them calling out in their sleep. She sat down, wrapping her arms round her waist and rocking forward and backward. Callie. Oh no. Callie.
The thought of empty days as well as empty evenings ahead was more than she could take right now. To her shame, she’d kept Henry up till 9
P.M.
tonight just to avoid being alone for another evening, risking the inevitable tantrum when he became overtired.
How long had Callie been planning this? She mulled over the last few months in her head. Of course, she’d noticed Callie becoming restless, even before Rae started school last September. That’s why she’d planned so many things for them to do together. And when Callie looked worried or miserable, she had done everything she could to be a good friend—listening, hugging, making her laugh. Once, just once, when Sasha had rung and left a flirtatious message on Jez’s business phone when Suzy was looking for a pen on his desk, she’d nearly confessed to Callie about her marriage troubles, but she could see from Callie’s eyes there was only so much more stress her friend could take. Instinctively, she knew Callie needed her to be strong. So what had gone wrong?
She groaned quietly. Now this—on top of what was happening with Jez?
Her husband, the enigma. Out again for the fourth night.
Her phone beeped. She took it out. It was a text from Vondra, saying she had received Suzy’s phone message and would ring back at 10
P.M.
She sighed. So, it was time.
Vondra had been asking her a lot of questions recently about her relationship with Jez. It had stirred it all up in her head.
“Was he like this when you married him?” she had probed gently, looking at Suzy over a cup of tea in a workers’ cafe in King’s Cross, her soft eyes full of sympathy.
“Yes,” Suzy had been forced to admit. All the clues had been there, so obvious, she couldn’t deny it even to herself now. The British diplomat parents who’d moved every few years from Syria to Malawi to Taiwan, leaving Jez in a boarding school from the age of seven. The violent, primal adventures that took place in that school, recounted to her as she lay wrapped in his arms those first months in Colorado. The fires in the school woods in the middle of the night; being hung by his legs, and hanging others, out of dormitory windows. Stuffing people in boxes and lifting them onto shelves for being “a bloody girl.” The ritual of chanting songs before strange team sports she’d never even heard of. It all seemed so eccentrically, exotically English.
It was when they finally got to England, she’d revealed to Vondra, that she’d realized her mistake. It was the way Jez spoke so politely and guardedly to his parents, who met the attempts at warmth from his new American wife with barely concealed distaste suggesting that she had stolen their son from some Home Counties girl called Arabella or Belinda. And the friends from school and university who communicated
with Jez in a muttered, posh, secret code laden with cruel in-jokes. Jez, she suddenly saw, was intimate with nobody. How else could he live and contract in Hong Kong for three months, then Denver, then Melbourne? No. There was no excuse. It had all been there on show from the start. She just hadn’t wanted to see it.
The pressure ball was now expanding so quickly inside her chest that she had to stand up to breathe. Before she could stop herself, she found herself walking straight into the bathroom and opening the cabinet door. The pack of razors that Jez kept high on a shelf, out of Henry’s way, sat innocently in their cardboard packet. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine the sharp cut already on the skin of her inner thigh, and felt the relief of the pressure ball escaping out of the slit.
“Damn it,” she said.
A loud bleep burst into the silence of the bathroom. Suzy felt her phone vibrate inside her jeans pocket and pulled it out. The screen read “private.”
“Hello?” she said quietly.
“Hi, Suzy? It’s Vondra,” said a cheerful-sounding woman with a soft Jamaican accent.
“Hey, hon,” Suzy said. She sat down on the toilet. Well, she’d asked for it and now she was going to get it.
“You ready, my love?” Vondra asked.
“Mmm,” Suzy replied, placing her other arm between her legs and leaning forward.
“OK, I’m afraid it’s not looking so good. I waited outside Churchill Road. I was expecting him to turn right toward the A10 to Hertfordshire. He actually turned left into town . . .”
Suzy sighed quietly.
“You OK, my love? Now listen, I followed him in. He went all
the way into Soho. He parked in the NCP car park on Wardour Street and walked to Ellroy’s. Do you know it?”
“No,” said Suzy faintly.
“It’s a private members’ club on Frith Street. He went there about an hour ago and he hasn’t come out. Now what else do you feel you’d like to ask me?”
Suzy gathered her courage. “You know what I need to hear, Vondra.”
“Sasha? You have to remember I only have the photo from your husband’s company website. But as far as I could see—and I’ve been outside for an hour now—she definitely hasn’t gone in. What I can’t swear to you is that she wasn’t in there before I arrived.”
Suzy took it in. She’d only met Sasha once, at a party for Jez’s clients that she had forced him to let her attend, but the young woman’s face was fixed in her memory: long-lashed doe eyes that searched Jez too longingly as he spoke, without bothering to turn to Suzy; the glossy, loose ponytail that she teased slowly around a tanned shoulder while she listened to him; a mouth that rolled softly into a pout as she sipped wine.
Suzy had seen it all before, in Denver. The kind of women who liked Jez—and there were a lot of them—usually didn’t bother to hide it.
Her thigh throbbed for her attention. No, she thought. Not since the night she found out she was pregnant with Henry, and never again. Jez would not drive her to that.
“Now, my darling, I can stay here as long as you like. What do you want me to do?”
Suzy thought. “Does the club have bedrooms? Could they stay there all night?”
“I think it does, my darling,” Vondra said. The kindness in
her voice always made Suzy want to cry. She knew what Vondra had been through with her own errant husband, and how running this business was more than just a moneymaking exercise. The first time Suzy had rung her, nervous and guarded, Vondra had listened to her for half an hour. At their meeting in the café Suzy had talked for two hours, warming to the woman’s kind voice and concerned expression.