A Minor Indiscretion (26 page)

C
hristian is very quiet. And white.

“Hangover?”

He nods and then looks as if he regrets it.

“Did you go out?”

“No.” He forgoes a shake of the head. “Watched
Match of the Day
with Rob.”

“Who was playing?”

“Er…”

I smile indulgently. “It must have been a great match.”

“Er…”

“Not that it matters,” I say. “I haven't a clue who any of the teams are anyway. Want some tea?”

There is an infinitesimal movement that indicates a yes. “Advil? Dark glasses?” I think that's a yes to all of them. His eyes are the cerise-pink color of pain, and every time he blinks I can tell that his eyelids are grating over his pupils like coarse-grade sandpaper. His nose is running and he is sniffing tiredly.

“Give me a minute,” Christian says hoarsely. “I'll be fine.”

“You must have done a lot of cheering.”

Christian sinks lower toward the table. “Yeah.”

Elliott comes into the kitchen and leans up against Christian's chair. “Are we going to do skateboarding?”

“In a minute.” Christian is looking less than convincing. I turn away to hide my smile.

“Anything to eat? Eggs and bacon?”

Christian gives an involuntary shudder. “No. No bacon.”

“Just eggs?”

“No. No eggs.”

“A minute's gone,” says Elliott.

I think Christian is beginning to realize that having a hangover does not preclude you from parental duties. A child who wants to be entertained cares little for any fragility in your constitution. I bet he wishes that he'd stayed at home in his cozy bed rather than rushing round here first thing this morning.

If Christian spent most of last night drinking, I lay awake most of the night worrying. Don't ask me what about. Everything is the short answer. The universe was bombarding me with worry vibes. I even got to wondering why I'd failed my maths “O” level, and that was about a hundred years ago and hasn't made the slightest difference to anything at all, nothing whatsoever, since. I tied myself in several knots over a scarf I have that belonged to my grandmother that's been kicking around since the 1950s which now has a nice hole fraying in one corner—not surprisingly. It was about three o'clock when I decided I ought to ask Jemma's advice on stopping the steady erosion of the fragile material. It's the sort of thing she would know about. She acts like she's the world expert on everything anyway. And then I worried why I hadn't thought of doing that earlier. See? I think I was avoiding worrying about the big issues really, like how are my children coping now that we are a dysfunctional family and how I'm going to pay my bills now that Kath Brown has bulleted me. I nearly, nearly rang Christian, but you know how it is. I didn't want to wake him up and then have him lying awake worrying that I was worrying.

“I'll come and watch you practice what I taught you yesterday, and then, when I'm feeling a bit better—” Christian looks remorsefully at me “—I'll show you some more. Go and put your knee-pads on.” Personally, I'd be happier if my child was wearing full body armor. Elliott, placated momentarily, heads for the door.

“How much time did that buy me?” Christian asks.

“With Elliott, not much. He's far too astute to allow a mere
adult to blackmail him.” I am quietly pleased at how quickly my lover is learning to manipulate his way round the minefield of child care.

“I'd better go out then.” Christian pushes away from the table rather unsteadily.

As he passes me, head hung low, I touch his arm. “I missed you last night,” I say.

“I missed you too.” And he looks so hang-dog that it makes me smile again. “I love you, Ali,” he says, his misery turning to seriousness. “You do know that?”

“Yes.” I nod reassuringly, but my heart starts to pound. Though at times, I do wonder why, I want to add. This can't be an easy situation for my young, beautiful boy. He takes my hands and puts them to his lips. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked and I bet his breath smells like a brewery.

“I'm sorry I got drunk.”

“It doesn't matter,” I say. “You're entitled to some fun. You're young. And foolish.”

“I am,” he says, and follows Elliott out into the sunshine. And I stand at the kitchen sink and wonder why I feel like crying. I start to prepare some food on autopilot, moving around my kitchen with a familiarity that belies the fact I haven't been a permanent resident for quite some time.

I can hear Elliott giggling, the carefree laughter of childhood, and I feel awful that in our cruel adult way we are compromising him, blighting his memories, marring the days that should be all sunshine and roses. It gives me a quiet surge of warmth to know that something as simple as a skateboard can provide temporary relief from his worries. Will I ever find the right time or the right words to tell him that we, Ed and I, never meant any of this to happen? It wasn't in our plan. Yet, all over the country fathers, and sometimes mothers too, are leaving their children. The divorce rate is so high now that I wonder it's not possible to see them streaming away in droves from their suburban houses in their Ford Mondeos—a mass exodus of confused, bewildered, displaced adults. What are the statistics now? One in three? Every minute someone is born and every minute someone dies, and in the blink-of-an-eye gap in between, someone leaves their family to the clutches of the legal system. I wonder how many of these leavings are premeditated, planned over months, years, of un
happiness and deadness? Men frustrated with their lives, their work, their softening stomachs, their receding hairlines. Women who, tired of years of picking up socks, decide to find themselves before it is too late and they are lost completely in a world of detergent adverts. And maybe for some of them it isn't like that. How many of them consider themselves happily married and then, through a series of silly and unfortunate events, find themselves outside that marriage, adrift on a raft of accusation and recriminations?

I call the boys in for lunch, and amid the vast issues of the breakdown of family life, still find the time to admonish myself for being a lousy cook.

 

We have finished lunch, such as it was. All that Ed has in the freezer is pizza, and I feel like offering to do a big shop at Tesco's for him to stock up, but I'm not sure how he'd take it.

Christian is struggling to force down some pizza, but I can tell his heart and his stomach aren't in it. But then, the pizza does vaguely resemble roadkill. He's looking a lot perkier though, and some blood has returned to his face. Elliott's has no blood, anywhere. And I'm truly grateful. His skateboarding lesson has again passed without incident which I feel is something of an achievement for an activity that is so potentially lethal. Elliott has decided that Christian is totally cool and they are happily bonding.

I prized Thomas away from Harry Potter to join us. I worry that Thomas is becoming quieter—along with everything else. Tanya has also graced us with her presence. She is wearing too much makeup and too little clothing. My daughter is treating Christian with an air of studied indifference that screams she also thinks he is totally cool.

“I want to pop round to Aunty Jemma's,” I say. “Anyone want to come?” My children stare blankly at me. “Don't all shout at once.”

“I want to stay here with Christian,” Elliott announces.

“Me too,” Thomas says, which is a bit surprising.

“Tanya?”

She shrugs.

“Is that a yes shrug or a no shrug?”

She shrugs again, but more emphatically.

“Shall I go on my own?”

“Yes,” Elliott says, peeling a mushroom from the abandoned remains of his pizza crust and licking it. “We'll take care of Christian.”

“Oh good.” I look at Christian, who seems unconcerned about being abandoned in the depths of my family. “Is that okay with you?”

“Yes,” he says, and I wonder if he's still a bit drunk.

“I won't be long. I just want to borrow some bikinis and bits for the holiday.” I want to ask her about mending Grandma's scarf too, but don't dare confess this anxiety in public. “Are you sure you'll be okay?”

They all stare at me as if I'm mad. “Well, I'll go then,” I say hesitantly. “There's ice cream if anyone wants it.”

“Fine.” Christian gives me a wan smile over his plate littered with pepperoni debris. “I'll sort it out.” And my children look at him as if they have no doubt that he can.

 

I shoot over to Jemma's, all in a flap and a panic. And when I get there, she's not really in the mood to talk. She's all grunty and distant, but obviously doesn't want to tell me why. I keep looking at my watch, and that irritates her a bit more.

“I never see you these days, Alicia,” she moans.

“Come back with me now,” I say. “I don't want to leave Christian alone with the children for too long.”

“Why? Do you think they'll scare him off?”

The thought had crossed my mind. “He isn't used to them.”

“Well, he's going to have to bloody well get used to them, isn't he?”

Clearly, my sister has not put a shilling in her sympathy meter today.

I give up trying to verbalize my anxiety and trail after her into her immaculate designer boudoir with her light oak wardrobes and her snow-white linen and her church candles that are never, ever burned. Jemma's picked out some of her poshest bikinis for me, which is very thoughtful of her, but how I'm ever going to get my bum in them I'll never know. I don't feel like exposing the full glory of my bare bottom to her ridicule, and so I stuff them in my bag with mumbled thanks and think that I'll try to rush into Marks & Spencer this week and spend some more money I
haven't got on a bikini that's designed to hold a sagging posterior. They might even do one with a built-in secret tummy-control panel and my tummy could do with all the secret control it can get. I am torn between not wanting to look like mutton dressed as lamb and not being mistaken for Christian's mum. A bikini feels like a fairly big danger zone.

“Will you look after the shop if I decide to go on holiday?” she says. “Seeing as you haven't got a job now.”

Thanks for reminding me, Jemma. “Yes. Of course I will.”

“Good.”

“When are you going?”

“I don't know.”

“Where are you thinking of?”

“What's this, Alicia?” she snaps. “The Spanish Inquisition?”

So, he's married and they're waiting to see when they can get rid of his wife. What's new? I make my excuses and prepare to leave, and my sister takes our grandmother's scarf as if it is an old dishrag and says she'll look at it, but I suspect it won't be this millennium.

I rush out as slowly as I can, promising to send Jem a postcard, but I expect I will exact a minor spite and won't. But then I'll probably buy her something nice when I get back to make up for it.

I fly back across London, careless of the lurking speed cameras, and can feel myself race into the gravel drive, so sit and make myself count to ten when I pull up in the drive. The gravel always heralds an entrance, but no one comes to greet me. Not even Elliott.

When I have served my patience penance, I find the kitchen is deserted, apart from the dirty pizza plates, and the ice cream is out on the table, melting. And when I go into the lounge I find out why.

Christian is fast asleep, stretched out on the sofa. Elliott is wedged along the length of his body, sucking contentedly on his thumb. Thomas is flat out on the rug in front of the fire, head resting on a cushion. And Tanya is flaked out in the armchair, showing an alarming amount of leg. I have never seen my children in this soporific state on a Sunday afternoon. Normally they are bounding around with energy like a pack of caged tigers. Some tired old film, possibly the original version of
The Thomas Crown
Affair,
is playing away to itself on the television with the sound off. I tiptoe into the room, and they are blissfully, peacefully unaware of my presence. My heart lurches, and I'm not sure if it's for the family I have lost or for the one that I have just found.

A
s is fitting for a holiday, we left a bog standard British battleship-gray sky behind at the purgatory known as Gatwick Airport, and now the sun is so sharp and clear and white it hurts your eyes to look at it directly; instead you have to squint behind your sunglasses and peer at it through knitted eyelashes. I never knew the color blue could be like this; it's deep and pure and totally unbroken.

I am lying on a strip of sand twenty-five meters wide and a hundred meters long and as flat as the proverbial pancake. That's all. This is Veligandu, which means, romantically, “spit of sand.” It is one of about a zillion similar spits of sand that make up the islands of the Maldives—somewhere I'd never actually heard of until Christian booked the tickets. Beyond the precarious coral reef which bounds our particular spit of sand, the ocean plunges violently to unmeasured fathoms that reach down farther than the height of our tallest mountains. So, in effect, I am lying on a spit of sand as high as a sea-locked Everest. It is a very strange feeling for a number of reasons.

One: even the slightest spitefulness from the ocean would obliterate this tiny scrap of laid-back civilization. Even a hint of a wave would cover the lot, sucking it back into the depths of the Indian Ocean forever, and it is far too beautiful for me to want
that to happen. And I'm sure Airtours wouldn't be too happy either. I think the thing that hurts most is that it's a horrible reminder that something so solid, so necessary, so abiding, something that other people depend on, can be swept away in an instant by nothing more sinister than a change in the wind. But I'm not going to think about my marriage. I'm here for the sole purpose of
not
thinking about my marriage.

Two: this is the first holiday I've ever been on without my children, which means I can relax on said sand safe in the knowledge that I'm not about to be buried up to my neck in it. I've never been particularly fond of sand, but then I've really only experienced heavy, wet, orange British sand. Sand that sticks damply to your skin, dyeing it brown and working its way inside your sandwiches, doing goodness knows what to your digestive system. This sand is fine white powder, as alluring and narcotic as cocaine. It trails through your fingers leaving no trace and, despite the supreme effort of the scorching sun, holds no heat. If you didn't like sand, this would, undoubtedly, be the wrong place to be. There are no floors in the casual arrangement of thatched buildings that calls itself the hotel, just more sand. Large crabs meander aimlessly through the dining room, and no one, not even me, which is amazing, takes the slightest bit of notice.

This is not a children's holiday. Elliott would be climbing the walls, if there were any, within ten minutes. There are no chirpy T-shirted happy club leaders, no water slides, no themed swimming pools, no water sports, no Frisbees, no Ping-Pong tables, no age 10–14's disco, no hut selling overpriced Wall's ice cream. Christian is the only person here under the age of thirty. This is the sort of holiday only couples do. Couples with plenty of cash because they have no children. Happy couples. Imagine being stuck on a spit of sand for a fortnight with someone you couldn't stand.

Three: I can't believe that Christian and I are here. We have left behind the stress and strain of London, Ed, Kath Brown, my sister, the lovely pouting Rebecca, the drizzle, the fumes, the bills and absolutely everything else. We are here in a blissful little cocoon that nothing—apart from unprecedented torrential rain—could spoil. For the first time in a long time, possibly my entire life, I am relaxed down to my bones. The heat has seared its way through my skin and muscles and is turning my hard, brit
tle skeleton to soft, melting wax. No doubt I'll pay for it in years to come with an excess of sun-induced wrinkles, but I'll just slap on some more anti-aging cream and consider it a price worth paying. Right now the sun seems unfeasibly kind and comforting. It is baking me back to health. My stomach isn't cramped into a knot as it has been since the first time I said hello to Christian. I really had no idea quite how stretched I'd become, and now that I've got off the giddy treadmill of my life, I wonder how I will ever get back on again.

There's only a handful of people here, scattered about in wooden water bungalows that jut out into the sea beyond the confines of the sand on twiggy stilts. Some are honeymoon couples, possibly vampiric, who have not yet ventured out into the cruel light of day. Fancy coming all this way and staying indoors. Or am I missing the point?

I have brought six books with me and have read none. Jemma would be very pleased about this, and you might understand why when I share a couple of the titles with you.
How To Drive Your Man Wild in Bed.
My favorite thing when I was married was to remark to Ed how the ceiling needed painting. I can quite categorically state that that never failed to drive him wild. Well, I was usually in the right position to notice it! And that alone will tell you that we probably needed help. And, anyway, I wouldn't dare suggest to Christian that the ceiling needed painting—God only knows what we'd end up with.

Another one is called
How To Make Anyone Like You
—which I'm really struggling with, because I'm not even sure I like myself much at the moment. They should produce these books with plain brown covers. They're all a bit too relentlessly cheerful and citrus in hue, which means that anyone within a half-mile radius can read the title and know that you are a sad sack, racked with insecurities. It's not what you might call typical holiday reading matter either, is it? The urge to improve oneself shouldn't extend into holiday periods. That's the two weeks of the year when you should be happy to be a sun-lounger potato and turn yourself into a lush (old-fashioned meaning) on bright blue cocktails with matching parasols and indulge yourself heartily from the calorie and botulism buffet. I should have gone out and bought something slushy by one of these trendy young authors with names like Charlotte, Clare or Camelia.

I have given up pretending to read; the light is too bright and I've spent my time staring at the infinitesimal swell of the sea, which is making me as drowsy as about ten Valiums.

Last night we sat on the beach, alone, holding hands, and watched the sun sink down beneath the sea. Dolphins swam across the horizon, silhouetted in the golden-orange light, leaping playfully as if they hadn't a care in the world. No wonder they always look like they're smiling—they don't have mortgages or school fees or high blood pressure or cellulite or Decree Absolutes. And I wonder if they realize how hard it is for us humans just to cope with existing, and why, after the age of ten, we somehow lose the urge to leap playfully.

As the sun set, it left a warm, comforting glow that spread across the surface of the ocean, familiar and soothing, and as I looked behind me the moon was already out, sharp, crescent-shaped, a slashed sliver of silver thread in a vast expanse of mysterious, unfathomable inky blackness. The stars twinkled, tantalizing, alluring, sparkling on the water like white diamonds scattered on plush black velvet. And I was torn. I didn't know which way to turn. What drew me most—the soft safety of the setting sun or the clear, rising newness of the moon and stars? If I could only look at one for the rest of my life, which would I be most willing to sacrifice?

Propping myself up on my elbows, I cup my face in my hands and look out to the sea, which is blue, beguiling and unthreatening, and as hard as I try to decide, I still don't know which I'd choose.

Christian is snorkeling. That boy—man—has more energy than is good for him. The word “tired” just doesn't cross his brain. I can just see the silver tip of his blowpipe glinting in the join between the turquoise of the sea and the azure sky. His fins are paddling lazily in the water and he's wearing a T-shirt, because I didn't want his back to get burned. He says I speak to him like a four-year-old, but then, at times, he can be as petulant as anyone I've come across—including Elliott. And I worry about him like he's a child—is he too hot, too cold, has he had enough to eat, has he put plenty of sunscreen on his beautiful delicate skin? It's only at night when we are alone in the seething warmth of our bungalow and he is moving above me in the dark and I can't see the youthful, exuberant light on his face that he is all man to me, my lover and only my lover.

Christian pads out of the sea and flops down on the beach next to me. “The water is so warm, Ali,” he says breathlessly. “It's like being in a bath.”

I pass him a towel and he puts it down without using it. “Have you ever made love in the sea?”

I think I can quite safely say that I haven't, but then all our holidays have been in Cornwall or Devon, which somehow doesn't have the same appeal. And the kids might have objected to waiting on the beach. “No,” I say.

Christian rolls over and kisses my feet. “I think it's something we have to correct.” His eyes twinkle and in this revealing light they are an indeterminate blue-gray, the color of the horizon where the sea meets the sky. I still have trouble believing that he loves me.

Some people are naturally charismatic. Princess Diana was. So is Jeffrey Archer. I met him once. You'll just have to take my word for it. Christian is too. He has an energy that radiates into a room the minute he walks in. It flows from him and draws people to him like iron filings to a strong magnet. They cleave to him, want to spend time with him. And he's not aware of it yet—I don't think. The worst thing about charismatic people is that once they realize they're charismatic they manipulate their attraction, and I hope Christian doesn't learn to do it, because it will make him a lesser man.

He leans against my sun lounger and rests his head back on my thigh, while I stroke his hair. We are becoming very comfortable with each other. I couldn't sleep when we were first together because I didn't know how to curl round him. I don't remember if it was ever like that with Ed, because we had fitted together so well for so long. Christian's hair used to tickle my nose and his arm was too heavy across my body and the rhythm of his breathing was all wrong and there were very interesting parts of his body which didn't seem to need sleep at all. Now we sleep easily, slotted together like spoons, and I'm not sure if I should view this as progress.

“Come and swim,” he murmurs.

It's a good idea. I'm probably just about done to medium rare, and the sea may well sizzle on my skin. I turn toward Christian, and he reaches up and strokes my face. His cheeks glow pink and his eyelashes are damp and dark. The sun has bleached his hair and he looks like he's just stepped out of a glossy magazine. “Do you love me?” he asks.

I do. My heart is melting, like my bones and probably my brain. “Yes,” I say. “I love you.”

“Good.” Christian jumps up and grins. “Last one in the water's a sissy,” he says and sets off down the beach.

I race after him, knocking
How To Make Anyone Like You
to the sand, and we cannon into the water, our joyous shrieking loud in the sunny silence. Christian surfaces from the sea just behind me, giggling and splashing. He wraps his arms round me and his lips, wet and salty, find mine and he pulls me down onto him; slowly, slowly we surrender to each other, sinking deep, deep beneath the waves. And I wonder at this moment, which will stay with me forever, whether it is possible to die of happiness.