‘Go on,’ said Natalie good-humouredly. ‘I can take it.’
‘All right, Megan, you stay here and dig yourself out of that.’ Rachel got up from the table, and felt her head swim. She made a mental note to get some Berocca on the next grocery run, before Megan’s cold took hold. ‘Listen, Natalie, can you hang on for ten minutes? This won’t take long.’
‘No problem.’ Natalie settled back and at once Bertie stirred from his slumber by the Aga and began to gaze hopefully at the biscuits. ‘So, Megan. You were saying.’
When Rachel pushed the office door open, the woman visitor wasn’t flicking through leaflets or peering around to see the dogs as most visitors did. She was simply waiting, arms folded across her sheepskin gilet.
‘Rachel?’ She stepped forward, looking her up and down.
‘Yes, hello.’ Rachel offered her hand to shake. ‘Sorry, Megan didn’t give me your name!’
Megan was right – this was a classic Westie owner. The lady was dressed in stylish jeans that were a fraction too high-waisted, with a camel polo neck the same colour as her highlighted mass of hair.
‘Kath.’ Her shiny pink lips curved into a smile of quiet amusement, as she took Rachel’s hand and gave it a limp squeeze. ‘Kath Wrigley. How funny. I thought you’d be younger.’
In all her walks with Gem, rehearsing the things she would say to Oliver’s wife if they ever met, Rachel hadn’t planned for this.
She’d planned for Kath raging out of control, Kath tragically telling her how she’d nearly wrecked her marriage, Kath smugly reminding her she’d pulled it back from the brink. Usually Rachel apologised beautifully but maintained a dignified defence that she had loved Oliver, no matter how wrong it had been.
She hadn’t planned for Kath turning up and giving her a pitying but not aggressive once-over, as though she was a curiosity, not a threat.
‘And I always imagined you’d be blonde,’ Kath added, more to herself than to Rachel.
Rachel withdrew her hand, and tried to recall some of her better lines, but she couldn’t. ‘
Always
imagined?’ she blurted out. ‘How long have you known about me?’
‘Oh, years. Years! Don’t take this the wrong way, Rachel,’ said Kath, ‘but it’s rather naive to think a wife wouldn’t notice her husband of twenty-two years is having an affair. I could tell from the difference in aftershave which days he was seeing you. Thursdays, wasn’t it?’
The simple intimacy sliced through Rachel like a paper cut and the wounds she thought had begun to heal over stung again.
‘I even know when your birthday is,’ Kath went on. ‘July the nineteenth. He wasn’t as clever as he thought. I mean, come on! The mysterious long weekend with clients, when they’re all on holiday? And then the shirts you preferred, the tiffs you had, the
moisturiser
you gave him that he pretended his PA got . . .’
Rachel couldn’t bear any more. Kath was making it sound so trivial – her ten-year love affair with the man who’d been as much hers as Kath’s. ‘So if you knew, why didn’t you say anything?’
Kath’s eyebrows raised in mock surprise. ‘Why didn’t I say anything? Why would I want to?’
‘You didn’t mind someone else sleeping with your husband of twenty-two years? You minded enough to drag him back. Why wait so long?’
Rachel’s heart was pounding despite her vow to keep cool. It was worse than when she’d actually broken it off with Oliver. Now she felt rejected
and
humiliated. She’d prepared herself to put on her sackcloth and ashes, but Kath was talking as if she didn’t even want her apology. Didn’t care one way or another
what
Rachel felt.
‘I didn’t
wait
.’ Kath sighed. ‘Oh, dear. I was wondering on my way here whether you’d be one of those cynical gold-diggers who was just in it for the minibreaks, or whether you’d be a silly romantic who thought he’d leave me for you.’
‘You never thought I might actually be in
love
with him?’ Rachel struggled to keep her voice under control. ‘Or that he might have been in love with me?’
‘No.’ Kath looked at her with beady eyes and Rachel saw several years’ worth of expensive Botox in her forehead. ‘Especially not at
your
age. I thought you’d at least be smarter than that. I mean, come on, darling! You work in PR! Aren’t you used to people spinning you a line? Oliver’s lying was what paid for our houses.’
Rachel summoned up what little dignity she felt she had left, given that she was wearing a pair of mud-streaked jeans and not enough make-up for a face-off with her lover’s wife. Ex-lover’s wife.
‘Fine. You’ve had your gloat,’ she said, tightly. ‘I’m sorry for what happened. It’s over, as you now know. You’ve got Oliver back, I’ve left my job, so can you please leave?’
‘Oh, but I haven’t got the little shit
back
,’ said Kath, surprised. ‘What on earth made you think that?’
The Staffies had started to play fight with each other, but Rachel didn’t hear. ‘But he went back to you. That’s why I sent you the flat keys.’
‘Oh no. No, no. He’s dumped us both, Rachel. Oliver and his midlife crisis has skipped off with Tara, his tennis coach.’ Kath spoke slowly. ‘It’s all over our village, the stupid, thoughtless bastard. I’m going to have to divorce him now, and that means all hell breaking loose. Oh, it wasn’t so bad with you,’ she went on, as Rachel’s jaw dropped. ‘I didn’t have to see you. You kept him out from under my feet, kept him amused. You were the reason I got my own holidays after fifteen years – I didn’t mind
you
.’
She said it with such distaste that Rachel felt cheapness spread over her like a rash. She’d been an itch-scratcher, nothing more.
‘But he never even mentioned a Tara,’ she whispered. A sudden insanity to know what this Tara looked like gripped her, what Tara sounded like, whether she was better, thinner, funnier than her.
Kath saw Rachel’s distress and patted her on the arm. ‘You don’t need to imagine very hard, sweetie. Just imagine what a midlife crisis looks like. She’s blonde. About twenty-five. Flexible – in all sorts of ways, I should think.’
‘Is he going to . . . marry her?’ Rachel’s voice was almost a croak.
‘More like is she going to marry
him
. I doubt it. Especially once she realises how little he’ll have left after everything’s split fifty-fifty, less school fees. But it’s his own fault. He could have stayed with you, seen his middle age out, retired in some comfort but now . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I came to give you these back.’
She dropped the flat keys into Rachel’s hand. Rachel stared at them with dull eyes. Her own Tiffany keyring was still on there, the one Oliver had given her for a thirty-fifth birthday present. She saw it for the first time: a tiny silver house, so perfect and safe. A house probably very like the one he’d driven back to, after making love to her.
‘Thanks for sending them. I just wish you’d seen his face when I worked out what was going on. He thought it was so neat and tidy – you’d finished with him, leaving him free to carry on with his bimbo, and me none the wiser about either of you. As it was, you tipped me off – so I thought the least I could do was to set you straight as well.’ She leaned forward and Rachel got a noseful of Chanel No. 5. ‘I don’t know if Oliver ever told you, but that flat belongs to him, not the agency. And if I were you, I’d get back in there and claim squatter’s rights or something. Because there won’t be much left once my solicitor’s had a good go.’
Rachel stumbled back into the house, trying desperately to stop the tears, but they flooded down her face and sent great choking waves up her throat. These would be proper hiccupping full body sobs in about a minute’s time, and she knew there was no way of stopping them.
She knew now she’d been coasting through on shock alone. All her grief now wasn’t for Oliver, it was for the mess she’d made of her own chances, and it made her want to curl up somewhere like a wounded animal, and die.
Oh God, she thought, Natalie was still in the kitchen. How could she get rid of her?
Too late. Natalie had heard her coming back into the house and was already approaching with last week’s
Longhampton Gazette
.
‘I’ve had a look through here and I reckon you could take out a whole page ad for virtually nothing,’ she said, eyes shining with project-managing zeal. ‘It would look . . . Rachel? Are you OK?’
‘Just had some bad news,’ gulped Rachel.
‘Sit down.’ Natalie shepherded her back into the kitchen and pushed her into a chair. ‘Oh my God, you’ve gone white. Do you need tea? A whisky?’
Rachel laid her head down on her arms and let the pain in her heart spread to the rest of her body.
The irony of it made her sick. Oliver was going to be divorced. Free. As simple as that – and he was doing it to be with someone else. Someone he’d
just met
! All those years she’d never asked about marriage because she’d believed his sob story about hating to hurt his kids by leaving – gone, like the worthless stacks of old newspapers she’d chucked out from the utility room.
She’d never be thirty again, never have that time again – when her bare legs didn’t need tights and she could drink all night – to find someone better. And this year she’d be forty.
‘Is it about your ex?’ asked Natalie, hovering anxiously. ‘Megan said you’d had some horrible experience . . .’
For a moment, Rachel considered which bits of the truth she could shave off, and not lie outright, but then she realised that it was over. She didn’t have to apologise to Kath, or feel bad, because Kath was pitying her. She was the only one who’d managed to come away with nothing.
What she had to risk now, though, was the warm new atmosphere there’d been round the table, when Natalie had started to confide in her. But what was the point? Friendships couldn’t be based on secrets. She’d only be worrying
when
Natalie would find out.
Rachel lifted her head and summoned up what little self-respect she had left. ‘That was my ex’s wife. She came to tell me that he’s left her
and
me for some blonde airhead.’
Natalie’s green eyes clouded. ‘What? Wife?’
‘I know. I don’t deserve any sympathy, but—’ Rachel gulped again as a fresh realisation hit her. Maybe this Tara was pregnant.
In that moment, she realised just how hard she’d suppressed the idea of carrying Oliver’s baby, as the bitterness sprang up like an oil strike. Oh no. That would be too cruel. Too unfair.
‘Get it off your chest,’ said Natalie. ‘Come on.’
Rachel braced herself. ‘I was with Oliver for ten years,’ she said. ‘On and off. We worked together, and it started off as an office romance, but it was more than that. I thought he loved me, but . . .’ Rachel stopped. She could hear the lies she’d told herself blaring out of her own words, and couldn’t bear to hear them any more. She didn’t sound smart or independent, she sounded like a total fool. ‘Anyway, I finished it, and now his wife’s come to tell me she’s divorcing him, because he’s gone off with another woman. He’s cheated us both. I’ve been . . .’ she shuddered, ‘so stupid.’
There. It was out. And Natalie just looked sorry, not disgusted. Her kind face scrunched up with sympathy.
‘Oh, Rachel. I don’t know what to say.’ She reached out and stroked her hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I don’t deserve it.’
‘You do. Whatever the ins and outs were, you loved someone and they’ve let you down. I’m not a judgy person,’ said Natalie. ‘I know there’s never a black or white answer to stuff like this. But you’re a beautiful woman, with a great sense of humour and . . . and so much going for you. Was that really the best you could do? A man who let you dangle around for ten years while he had it both ways? I can’t believe he was the only man you could have dated.’
Rachel shook her head, as big sobs gripped her ribcage. ‘He was the one I loved. And don’t tell me what a cliché that is, because I know.’
‘But it’s over now,’ said Natalie. ‘That’s in the past. You’re free to meet the right guy now, someone who
can
give you what you want.’ She made it sound so matter-of-fact, another project that could be arranged and achieved. ‘I know Longhampton’s not exactly a hot spot for talent, but there are some nice guys here. Come out to the pub quiz, with me and Johnny. You know Bill already – Lulu’s new dad – the doctor and my book group girls, if you don’t mind getting competitive about ‘Friends’ trivia. Is that a smile, or what?’
Rachel had to acknowledge it was. Just a watery one.
Natalie smiled back and squeezed her hand. ‘My mum always told me that you should look at your problems as if you were advising your best friend, and not be so hard on yourself. Like, when I beat myself up for not getting pregnant yet, I say, no, if it was a mate I’d tell her to give it time. Not to take it as a personal failure, but just one of those things.’
She paused, her face soft with sympathy. ‘And you should be the same. This, whoever he was, Mr Love Rat, wasn’t the right man. It just took you a long time to work it out but now . . .’ Natalie shook her hand. ‘Now you’re like the dogs in there. Waiting for the forever man to turn up and choose you.’