‘Are you here permanently?’ Lara said. Jack was now rubbing his head against her side, spreading snot over her green linen top.
‘Until at least next summer, if not longer,’ Stephen said. And, for the first time since they had arrived, he looked her directly in the eyes.
‘What about your films?’ Olly butted in.
‘They can wait,’ Stephen said. ‘There are more important things.’
‘Like avoiding stalkers,’ Olly said.
‘You could say that.’
‘Oh Jack!’ Lara said, as Jack finally managed to upend her glass, adding wine to the snot-trail on her front.
‘Let me get you something,’ Stephen said, standing up and heading back into the house.
‘I don’t think he wants to talk about the stalker, mate,’ Marcus said to Olly once Stephen was out of earshot.
‘Just making polite conversation,’ Olly said.
‘Just leave it, right?’ Marcus said. ‘And take the fucking gum out.’
Stephen came back out with a damp piece of kitchen towel and handed it to Lara. Again, for a second, their hands touched.
‘So Trudi said she helps you out here,’ Lara said to try to earth herself.
‘Trudi?’ Marcus said.
‘You know, she was serving the meat at James and Betty’s,’ Olly said, helpfully drawing Trudi’s scar line from lip to ear on his own face.
‘Ooh, yes. Ouch,’ Marcus said.
‘She looks well rough,’ Olly said.
‘Olly,’ Marcus said.
‘That’s because she’s had a rough life,’ Stephen said. ‘She used to be a dancer, got into drugs and things descended from there. Spent five years inside.’
‘What for?’
‘Fraud, I think. Anyway, she found God, put on fifty pounds and when she got out Betty scooped her up – they used to work in this cabaret in the East Village together, and they’re from the same part of Tennessee. She installed her in Trout Island as one of her charity cases. When I came here, Betty couldn’t imagine how I would cope on my own, so Trudi was sworn to secrecy and loaned to me whenever I need a hand. I
don’t
ever need a hand, but I send her off on the odd wild goose chase from time to time, just to keep everyone happy.’
‘Mummy, I’m bored,’ Jack said, banging his head against Lara’s chest.
‘Jack. That’s so rude! I’m so sorry for my rude, rude son, Stephen,’ Lara said.
‘Sons,’ Marcus corrected her, a stern eye on Olly.
‘Well, it is pretty dull, listening to grown-ups go on and on. Would you guys like to take Jack out into the backyard?’ Stephen said to Olly and Bella. He pointed to a grassy meadow that skirted round the side of the house. ‘See if you can find any snakes?’
‘Euch,’ Bella said. ‘No thanks.’
‘Snakes!’ Jack said, jumping off Lara’s lap. ‘Come on, Lolly.’ He tugged at his big brother’s hand.
‘Take a stick,’ Stephen said. ‘There’s a couple leaning against the wall by the back door.’
‘Come on, weed,’ Olly said to his sister.
‘Oh God. All right then,’ Bella said, getting up and following her brothers. ‘But I’m not doing anything without a stick.’
The three adults watched the children as they tiptoed through the long grass, taking each step with enormous care, peering down to look at their feet in case they got snake-lucky.
‘Great kids,’ Stephen said, pouring more wine into Marcus and Lara’s glasses.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Marcus said.
‘I envy you,’ Stephen said to Marcus.
Lara looked up from her dabbing, but his expression was neutral.
‘But you’ve been the lucky one,’ Marcus said.
‘I think not.’ Stephen turned to Lara. ‘We should really put that top to soak,’ he said. ‘Or it’ll be ruined.’
‘It’s fine, honestly. Please don’t worry.’
‘No, I’ll find you a shirt to change into, and we’ll get some stain remover on it. It’s a beautiful top. You don’t want to ruin it.’ He looked at Lara for just one second, then he stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a tick.’
‘Great guy. Nothing’s too much trouble,’ Marcus said, after Stephen had gone inside.
‘He’s certainly very kind.’ Lara put her head down and rubbed the back of her neck, where the sweat had gathered at her hairline.
‘I’d rather be inside in the air-conditioning, though,’ Marcus said.
They sat in silence, sipping their warm red wine in the stultifying heat. Somewhere in the distance, Lara heard a rumble of thunder. A tightening at her temples told her the storm was nearly on them.
‘There you go,’ Stephen said, coming back out through the fly screen, letting it snap shut behind him. ‘You can roll the sleeves up. I hope it’s OK.’ He handed her a Prada man’s shirt covered in a subtle geometric print. ‘It should go with your trousers. Look, the colour here –’ he pointed to the background, a dark olive green – ‘is the exact shade. Give me your top when you’ve changed and I’ll put a spot of Vanish on it.’
Lara took the shirt, amazed not only at his kindness, but also at the way he had noticed what she was wearing and the thought he had put into choosing the colour.
‘Use my room to change in,’ he said. ‘Just go up the stairs and take the first right.’
She went inside and again the damn fly screen slammed shut behind her, making the skin on her face prickle with shock. The ceiling fan turned, cooling the interior, and whatever was cooking in the oven made the place smell like coming home. Stephen had a real touch; there was comfort here, and order. And for a man to have a bottle of Vanish, let alone know how to use it, astounded her. If she didn’t know better, she would have given more credence to the ‘Stephen Molloy is gay’ rumours that buzzed from time to time around the celebrity gossip magazines she read in her dentist’s waiting room. But here he was, welcome – if rare – proof that a straight man could be domestically competent.
‘What-if,’
he had said.
Wasn’t she just getting carried away? What though, she thought as she climbed the dark, polished wooden staircase that turned on a square in the centre of the house, what if she hadn’t found out she was pregnant by Marcus? What if the twins had never happened?
She stopped on the half-landing and held Stephen’s shirt to her face, closing her eyes and breathing in the scent of him. He had been the love of her life. She had known it back then, and she realised now that she knew it still.
But then things might have gone differently had they been able to stay together. She remembered a story about a pre-Monica Lewinsky Hillary Clinton driving into a gas station where she was served by an ex-boyfriend. ‘Imagine,’ the guy said. ‘If we’d married, you would have been the gas station guy’s wife.’
‘If we’d married,’ Hillary corrected him, ‘you would have been President of the United States.’
Lara would probably have been a reverse Hillary, holding Stephen back while Marcus went on to be the star. But perhaps everyone would have been happier like that?
She continued up the stairs and found Stephen’s bedroom. The scent of him was strong in there, and she closed her eyes, breathing him in. A big, king-sized bed, perfectly made up with crisp linen, stood in the middle of the far wall. Beside it on one of the bedside tables was a pile of books, novels mostly: Roth, Bellow, Updike.
She peeled off her snot- and wine-stained top, thinking she would just quickly change, then make her way back downstairs. But she needed a pee, and there was an en suite bathroom so immaculate it could have been in a five-star hotel. The toiletry items on the open shelves – aftershave, shaving soap, razor, toothpaste – were evenly spaced, each one turned to show its best side. Two towels were neatly folded over a metal radiator, and the rest were wound up in a wooden recess in the limestone wall, their clockwise-curled faces like a nest of fluffed-up ammonites. She marvelled at the man who lived in this way.
As she sat and peed, she noticed a row of pill bottles on top of the tall spotlit mirror over the sink. When she was done, she stood on the toilet lid and looked at them.
In amongst the vitamins and herbal supplements, she saw a plastic bottle of Xanax, a blister pack of Valium and a bottle of Prozac, which she shook and found to be half-empty. Not so surprising in America, even for a Brit, she supposed. She jumped down. Poor man, she thought, all on his own out here, with only his art and his books and his pills for company.
Looking in the mirror, she took off her bra and washed her underarms with Stephen’s soap, patting them dry with his towel and anointing them with his deodorant. She didn’t want to sweat on his lovely shirt. Then she replaced everything back where she found it, positioning it exactly.
Back in the bedroom, she buttoned up the cool cotton shirt. It was too big for her, of course, but not ridiculously so. Stephen was tall, but he was slim, so she felt less swamped than on the few occasions when she had worn Marcus’s clothes. She remembered a time in Cambridge when, drunk, she had fallen from a punt wearing a white dress that turned transparent when wet. With a little persuading, Marcus had given her the shirt off his back to cover her modesty, and in return had received a nasty dose of sunburn. She had felt particularly lost in that shirt.
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on Stephen’s bedroom wall. He had been right. The colour went beautifully with her olive linen trousers. She rolled up the sleeves and undid another button at the neck.
Picking up her soiled top, she moved towards the bedroom door. But something held her back. Without really meaning to, she sat on what she knew would be his side of the bed and opened the drawer in the bedside table.
For a second, her heart stopped. Inside, right on top of everything else, was a photograph. Smiling up at her, her bob its original undyed black, her skin as yet unlined, her slim arm around a beaming Stephen, was her own nineteen-year-old self. She picked up the photo and peered closer. She was wearing that red floral crêpe dress with the slightly puffed sleeves, the dress she remembered living in that summer. From the angle of her other arm, she must have been taking the photograph, pointing the camera back at herself and her lover. Behind them the billowing tops of an ancient woodland outlined a blue sky and a green meadow.
She remembered that day as if it were yesterday.
Marcus was in rehearsal from early morning, going straight into an evening performance of
Henry IV, Part One
. Not being in the
Henry
, Stephen was free, and he wasn’t called for rehearsal either. So, grasping their opportunity, they hired a car and drove south towards the rippled grassland of Dover’s Hill, near Chipping Camden, where they ate strawberries and drank champagne before tiptoeing off to make a nest among the oak trees that had watched over that land since Norman times. And there, on that Gloucestershire hill riven with Iron Age workings, they made love properly for the first time.
Afterwards, they lay wound together, making plans for their future. She would tell Marcus that it was all over; they would disappear from him and move to London. She would go to drama school while Stephen worked and looked after her. And then they would be actors together and live in a house in Camden with its own front door and a long Persian carpet running along the hallway.
It was a remarkable day for many reasons, but most particularly because, for the only time in their short and intense affair, they were not involved in any sort of subterfuge – at least, not once outside the Stratford-upon-Avon town boundary. While affairs were commonplace in the incestuous theatre community there, they were usually between actors living away from their spouses. For Lara, barmaid promoted to wife of a company actor, cavorting publicly with someone else would have been unthinkable. So her liaison with Stephen had to be secret.
It was mad – she knew it at the time – but it had been unavoidable. Had she been older, more embedded in her marriage, had she not heard about Marcus marrying her on the rebound, she might have been better equipped to resist Stephen. But she knew back then, from the moment that he walked into her bar and looked at her, that he was bound for her.
If only they had met a year earlier. If only she hadn’t married in such haste. She looked at the photo and reminded herself that, even then, the twins were secretly dividing their cells inside her. Even when she first met Stephen they had been there. The dates proved it. She had gone over and over this point.
And had she and Marcus repented at leisure? It hadn’t been so bad, had it? The worst thing was the mourning she went through when Stephen left.
She had blundered into the Garrick Inn, light-headed and nauseous, not sure of how it was going to go with him. The doctor had assured her she was ten weeks pregnant. She had been seeing Stephen for eight, so she knew that the baby – she had no idea at that point about it being twins – was Marcus’s. She slipped into the seat beside Stephen in the smoky back bar. He grabbed her hand underneath the table.
‘You look beautiful today,’ he said. ‘Especially beautiful.’
She closed her eyes, looked down, breathed in deep, then levelled her gaze directly at him and told him what was on her mind and in her womb. The blood drained from his face.
‘You’re sure?’ he said after what seemed to her like her entire lifetime.
‘Yes.’
‘Sure of the dates?’
‘Yes.’ Fat tears rolled down her first-trimester flushed cheeks. She hadn’t dared to imagine what might happen at this meeting.
‘But I could bring it up as my own,’ he said, taking her hand now above the table. ‘No one need ever know.’
Outside – and she didn’t know why she could recall this detail so clearly – a convoy of vehicles with sirens went by, stopping all motion in the pub, making it impossible to talk, filling the bar with disco-flashing blue lights.
But what if it turned out to look like Marcus? she thought. Stocky, red-hair genes coursed through his entire family. How on earth would Stephen – tall, slender and dark – ever pass off a mini-Marcus as his own?
‘I have to tell Marcus,’ she said in the lull that followed the siren cacophony. ‘I would never, ever forgive myself if I didn’t.’
Stephen sighed as if he, too, saw the impossibility of their situation, then he put his hands across his face. Lara sat and looked at him, feeling like a tightrope walker with no safety net beneath her. When he eventually looked up, his eyes shone hot with tears.