As he walked round the maisonette, he knew without a doubt that he would not be living there for much longer. This flat was his marital home. He and Jo had lived here since before they were married. Hugh remembered the first time they had come to look round, nine years before. He had still been amazed that this beautiful woman wanted to go out with him. He had been even more grateful when she had suggested living together.
He had always known that he had been lucky to get Jo. She was, when he met her, a slim 25-year-old, with long blonde hair and good clothes. Jo could have done anything she wanted, could have had anyone she wanted, and she had known it. Her ambition had always been to run her own gallery, and by the age of twenty-eight, she had achieved it.
They had looked at four flats, but this was the first one Jo had deemed suitable.
‘It’s perfect!’ she told the estate agent crisply. ‘We’ll be in touch later this afternoon with an offer.’
Hugh had nodded in agreement. He would have been enthusiastic to move into a cowshed had Jo suggested it.
Hugh supposed his relationship with Jo had never been quite healthy. He had been desperately grateful for her attention from the moment she had first spoken to him. Knowing her as he now did, he imagined that she must have relished the challenge. He had been her project. She had met a slightly geeky young man, twenty-five but in many ways still fifteen, who was living in a scummy bedsit. She had transformed him into a man she was proud to call her husband. In fact, she had transformed him too well.
They had met at a party. It was a hot summer night, the sort that gave Londoners a new verve and allowed them to imagine themselves as Spaniards or Cubans. Hugh hadn’t known whose party it was. He had been in the pub after work when someone who knew someone had suggested they all go along. Hugh had, of course, had nothing else planned. He was living in a bedsit in south London, sharing a bathroom with three invisible strangers while he saved up to buy a place of his own. There was a small, smeared window above his bed, which looked out onto the fire escape and the back of some other flats. There was no garden, not even a patch of concrete or a flat roof, and no view. Going home was not an enticing prospect. Going to someone’s party would be more interesting than spending yet another evening in the pub.
Later, he was sitting on the grass in a parched garden, nursing a bottle of beer and watching some women. Hugh was frustrated. He had had girlfriends, and women had been interested in him, but he lacked the confidence to approach the women he really liked. The ones who approached him were not, he thought, mocking himself, his type. It did not take much analysis to realise why this was. His type was a slender blonde with big eyes and long legs. He had never been particularly imaginative. Whereas the women who thought he might like them tended to be flawed and human, and even if they were appealing sometimes, he didn’t quite know how to talk to them. He drank from his bottle and wondered if he would ever work it out.
When he looked up, Jo was standing in front of him.
‘Hi!’ she said, and sat down next to him. She was his feminine ideal, brought to life.
‘Oh,’ he answered, looking at her and then down at his drink. ‘Oh, hello.’
‘I’m Jo.’
‘I’m Hugh.’
‘That’s funny. You’re called Hugh, and you look like Hugh Grant.’
He frowned at her. ‘I don’t look anything like Hugh Grant. My hair’s the wrong colour.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ She smiled at him again. ‘You don’t look exactly like him, I mean I didn’t think you
were
him when I saw you, or anything. But you’ve got that shy thing that he does.’ She peered at him, her eyes laughing. ‘You don’t realise how cute that is, do you? It’s not an act, is it?’
Hugh was baffled. ‘What’s not an act?’
‘You sitting there like that, looking at me and looking away again. The way you keep running your fingers through your hair.’
He shook his head. ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’ This was the summer of
Four Weddings
. It had never occurred to him that this might make his own brand of awkward ineptness suddenly attractive and charming. Panicking slightly, he wondered what he could do to consolidate his advantage.
Jo took his hand. ‘I’m a little bit drunk,’ she told him. ‘Are you?’
He felt the pressure of her hand on his and smiled. He wanted to squeeze it but wasn’t sure if he ought to. ‘Maybe. Just a little bit.’
She looked around. ‘This is a nice party but I think we should go now. Um. I arrived by cab with a load of people. I wasn’t paying attention. Do you know which part of London we’re in? North, isn’t it?’
‘We could walk to Hampstead Heath from here,’ he suggested. ‘Easily.’ He had been stunned at his own audacity.
She had leapt up. ‘Come on then.’
He picked up a photograph of himself and Jo at their wedding. It had not taken her long to smarten him up, to buy him nice shirts and ties in interesting colours rather than the white and blue that had filled his wardrobe before. By the time they got married, when they were both twenty-seven, Hugh was confidently buying his own Armani and Ted Baker. He paid a lot more than seven pounds to have his hair cut. In the photo, Jo looked exquisite in an elegant thirties-style dress with flowers in her hair. He did not look too bad either. He was grinning so widely that it almost split his face. He had had it all, back then. He had hit the jackpot. He had married a beautiful woman who loved him. He had been able to talk to Jo. She was different from any other woman, because he could say anything to her, and if she laughed at him, it was in exactly the right sort of way.
He put the photo down and ambled up the stairs. He could barely say a word to her now. Anything he said would be seized on and dissected for evidence of further deceit. She despised him, with good reason.
Sometime after their first wedding anniversary, Hugh had begun looking at women differently. Jo had moulded him into a confident and stylish art-world husband. He had been promoted at work. He started having to go away to work on projects all over the world. He realised that women took notice of him, that everyone from air hostesses to conference organisers to waitresses to economists looked at him with sparkling eyes. They flicked their hair and searched for eye contact. They smiled at him and brushed their hands against his. Sometimes they would see his wedding ring and make remarks about all the best ones being taken.
He had loved it. At first he would report every flirtatious woman back to Jo and they would laugh together, while she warned him not to let it go to his head and reminded him that the many men of the London art world were in a state of collective lust around her, which was true. He assured her he had no interest in any other woman. Jo was the only woman in the world for him. He meant it when he said it. Gradually, however, his interest was piqued. He told himself that he had only been twenty-five when he met his wife, and that that was extremely young these days. And although he hadn’t been a virgin when he met her, he might as well have been because she had transformed his sexual ability completely. He had never been admired before.
He told himself that he was allowed to take a beautiful woman for a drink, as an experiment. He would not, he assured himself, dream of being unfaithful to Jo. The very idea made him indignant. He was simply allowing himself to enjoy the attention, to keep his spirits up while he was away from his wife.
He was at a meeting in Rome when a beautiful girl who was serving coffee brushed her hand across the back of his neck in passing. He turned and gave her a brilliant smile. She returned it. He caught her hand and held it for a second. She let him. After the meeting, she came back in to collect the coffee cups. He walked over to her, amazed at his own audacity, and said hello. She was small but curvy, with long dark hair and deep brown eyes. She was the opposite of Jo and he liked that.
They had a drink that evening. They had dinner. He flirted with Delfina, lavished attention on her, kissed her. He spent the night being repeatedly, joyously, extravagantly unfaithful to his wife. They had breakfast in bed. She laughed and kissed him when he confessed to being married.
‘I know!’ she told him. ‘Silly. You have a ring. And besides, these sorts of men are always married, more or less.’
He had liked the idea of being married more or less. Hugh didn’t feel a twinge of guilt until he arrived at Heathrow, and even then, his main fear was that Jo would take one look at him and know what he had done. She didn’t notice anything. She was perfectly normal and affectionate towards him, and he was wonderfully considerate to her.
It had become a habit. He reasoned that it hurt no one, since Jo was never going to find out. It was his hobby. Casual sex in foreign hotel rooms was what Hugh did to relax. He discovered interests that he had never imagined before. He could ask these compliant girls to do whatever he wanted, and they rarely refused. He made it a point of honour never to see the same girl twice. He had it under control. He was determined not to be caught, because he knew that Jo would leave him, and that he would be nothing without her.
Hugh went into Oliver’s bedroom. It was filled with crap. When Olly was born, Jo had made a rule that he could only have wooden toys, no plastic, and no brand names. It had lasted until his first birthday, when he had been inundated with plastic toys, from both their families. Jo’s parents were rather in awe of their daughter, so had half stuck to her rules and had at least bought non-branded plastic toys. Hugh’s mum and dad, on the other hand, had gone overboard with Thomas the Tank Engine, Teletubbies, and Bob the Builder merchandise. Jo had hidden her fury behind tight smiles. Hugh had not dared confess that he had instigated it all with the words, ‘Buy him whatever you like.’
Olly had loved Thomas the Tank Engine at first sight. He had worn his Teletubbies pyjamas day and night. The first time he put two words together was to sing ‘Yes! Can!’ in reply to Bob the Builder’s query. He had discarded the wooden objects and played with the plastic. Eventually, Jo had conceded defeat. They got CBeebies soon afterwards.
Olly was out but this room was filled with his spirit. There was a pile of his clean clothes, folded on top of the chest of drawers. Posters of Nemo and Monsters, Inc. adorned the walls. His trucks were piled up in a corner. A giant marble run took up most of the floor. Hugh had built it with him yesterday afternoon. They had made it as high as they could and clattered all the marbles down it in a long line. Hugh had been super dad, horribly aware that although he was doing his best to persuade Jo that he would never dream of cheating on her or lying to her again, he was unlikely to be resident in Highcroft Road much longer. Of course she couldn’t trust him. Every time he promised not to lie to her again, she just told him that he was lying. He could not win.
It was not going to work. He knew it, she knew it. He didn’t even know if he wanted it to work any more. Each time he contemplated a lifetime of contrition and craven considerateness, he wanted it less. This had swayed their power balance completely. They would never have a functioning relationship now.
Jo could barely bring herself to speak to him. She had told him that, if they were to try again, he must never speak to Emma. He could, she had said, support Alice, and he must, of course, stay in touch with her, but he had to put money into Emma’s account for Alice’s maintenance without talking to her, and he must send presents and letters directly to Alice, and not to Emma. She had supervised the horrible letter he had written, and she had posted it. He had agreed to everything because he had felt desperate to salvage whatever he could. They had been living together for the past week, but her hatred had been tangible. He was approaching the point when he was going to be relieved to leave.
He hoped Emma had not realised how tempted he had been by her pleas. He had not imagined Emma’s feelings through any of this. If anything, he had assumed she would turn away from him and never speak to him again. But she wanted him back. She seemed to know as well as he did that there was no future in his marriage. He knew he had to resist. A relationship built on the knowledge that he could do anything he wanted with impunity would not be good.
His days of shagging strangers in hotel rooms seemed a million light years behind him. He had stopped doing it when he met Emma, because he had been surprised at how much he had enjoyed himself when he was with her. He had spent all his spare time with her. He teleconferenced whenever he could, and because he was senior in his company by that point, he had largely got away with it. He managed to change his role slightly so he could work from home half the week and in the office the rest of the time. He avoided overseas travel altogether and spent half the week with Emma, working in her tiny third bedroom. In fact he spent so much time with her that after a while, he realised that she had assumed he had moved in.
He had never intended to hurt her. Although he had always told himself that Emma coped with everything, he knew, really, that she was fragile. He remembered that she had said something about her mother. He had barely heard her mention her mother before. She must have been in a state. He shuddered to think what he had done to her. Yes, Jo was extremely upset and angry, but she would get over it. He could imagine her now, calling him a bastard to all her friends. They would be rallying round. This was the kind of event Jo’s friends lived for.
Emma, though, could be set up for a full-blown crisis. He had thought he was being cruel to be kind this morning, but perhaps he should have been gentler. Perhaps he could go back to France and work from home. Perhaps he and Emma could retreat from the world and try to have a real relationship.
That idea was scary. He had never had a real relationship. He had fallen in love with Jo because she was blonde and beautiful and slender, but they had never been soul mates.
He thought of Emma, standing on the doorstep looking small and desperately hurt. Everything about her had been a bit different. She would never have dreamed of calling him a bastard before, would never have lost control and cried in front if him, would certainly never have poured her drink all over him. He was glad she had done that. It had shown spirit, and she was going to need spirit.