‘I haven’t heard from him since Christmas,’ I reminded her. ‘We’ve had one conversation, on Christmas Day, and that was crap. He hasn’t written or even emailed. I kind of thought he’d email. It’s the coward’s medium.’ I looked at her, trying to work out from her expression whether she knew anything about his present circumstances. I had a strong suspicion that Andy stayed in touch with him. Fiona gave nothing away. She looked permanently queasy these days, and that was all.
‘Emma,’ she said, widening her eyes. ‘You have to get in touch with him yourself. Duh. You
have to
demand money. He owes it to you. You cannot possibly be expected to pay a mortgage, for a house you bought with him, and look after his child, all on your own in a foreign country when you only have four hours a week of paid work. The man has already proved himself to be a bastard. Don’t you dare sit around waiting for him to do the decent thing. He’s charming, granted, but he’s not a decent man. He’s relying on you not to push him. He knows how nice you are and he’s taking advantage of you. As he always has done.’
‘I don’t want to get in touch with him. I can’t nag for money. I want to be more independent than that.’
‘Did he say he’d support Alice?’
‘Several times.’
‘And does he?’
I put my head on one side and tried to be fair. ‘He has made payments into our bank account.’
‘How much?’
‘A couple of hundred euros. But it wasn’t regular. And it didn’t go very far.’
Fiona shook her head and stood up. ‘Top-up?’ She took my cup. ‘Emma Meadows,’ she called over her shoulder, as she went to the kitchen. ‘Two hundred euros is nothing. We both know that. It’s a token. More insulting than nothing, in my opinion. I understand why you don’t want to contact him. No one wants to be in a position where they’re demanding money from someone who’s screwed them over.’ She came back and handed me my cup back. It was filled to the brim with coffee. ‘But, love,’ she said, ‘you’re not doing it for you. You’re doing it for little Alice. You know that Andy and I have had our rocky patches. If I was in your position, with this little baby in here to think of . . .’ She patted her stomach. ‘I tell you I wouldn’t hesitate.’
I looked at my lap. I felt like a failure for the fact that I couldn’t support my daughter. ‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘You’re much stronger than me. I know that I need his help. Even if he was helping out, I’d still put the house on the market. I need to move away for my own sanity as much as anything. I can’t stay out here with next to no work. London’s fine for children really. There are parks and stuff, and good schools, and galleries, and the London Eye and the Aquarium. I’ll be close to Geoff and Christa, and I’d love that. And Bella and Charlotte are in London, and so’s Rosie for the moment. Alice can go to the French Lycée when she’s bigger. I could get a proper job and support us both. We’ll come back here on holiday to see everyone. The estate agent’s coming over tomorrow.’
Fiona leaned back on the absurdly comfortable sofa.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘Could we offer you a loan?’
I shook my head. ‘Geoff offers me a loan every day. It’s not the answer. I can’t live off borrowed money. I need a longer term solution.’
‘We’ll miss you.’
I forced a smile. ‘Don’t.’
I picked Alice up from school at half past four feeling nervous. As usual, she came across the playground holding hands with her current best friend, a doll-like child called Melanie. When she saw me she rushed into my arms. I scooped her up. She turned round and waved to Melanie. ‘
Au revoir
,’ she called.
She looked just like the other children. She was wrapped up in a big coat, with her scarf knotted round her neck. She was wearing clumpy winter shoes and cream woolly tights which were splattered with mud from the playground puddles. Her skin was edibly perfect, and she glowed with happiness and health. Alice loved school. Since she had been able to understand what was going on, and now that she was increasingly able to join in with games in French, she had blossomed. She often ate school lunches without complaint, and she no longer dismissed it to me, afterwards, as ‘funny food’. She had a nap on a camp bed on the floor with the other children. She asked me every week when she could start using the school bus.
‘Alice,’ I said, after I had strapped her into her car seat. ‘Do you remember our old house in England?’
‘And the teacher said, you mustn’t go outside because it’s time for singing,’ she told me brightly. ‘She told us off.’
‘I don’t expect she was really telling you off,’ I said, as I started the car. ‘She was probably just telling you it was singing time. What did you sing?’
After Alice’s confident rendition of a song which, as far as I could understand, was about fingers and thumbs hiding and jumping out, I tried again.
‘You remember our old house?’ I looked at her in the rear-view mirror to check that she was concentrating.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In English.’
‘In England. Would you like to go back to England?’
‘Daddy’s there?’
‘Yes. You can see Daddy a lot if we go there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Daddy’s work is there.’
‘Why’s Daddy’s work’s not here?’
‘Because Daddy doesn’t speak French.’ I decided against detailing the other reasons.
‘Why doesn’t Daddy speak French?’
I sighed. ‘The issue is, darling, that we will probably go and live in England again.’ And you will have to go to a nursery that, while perfectly pleasant, will not be a patch on the village school. And you will live in a busy city, where we will only just manage to afford to rent a tiny flat. And we will have no garden, no playroom, no log fire, no cows nearby, no tractors trundling past, no chickens. And I will work full time so we can manage without your wayward father. You and I will only really see each other at weekends. And it will probably be alternate weekends, at that.
I looked at Alice in the rear-view mirror. Her attention had wandered.
‘Did you bring me a biscuit?’ she demanded.
I passed one back to her. ‘You know I always bring you a biscuit.’ Children are adaptable, I told myself for the thousandth time. The upheaval to Alice is the least of my worries. It seemed heartbreaking to me, but she would take it in her stride.
That evening I phoned Matt. There was no reply at Pete’s flat, and I was relieved. On the spur of the moment, I punched in Jo’s number. I didn’t need to look it up. I knew it by heart, even though I’d never called it.
I hoped that she, too, would be out, but she answered after three rings.
‘Hello, Jo,’ I said quietly, and left a brief pause for the woman to tell me that she wasn’t Jo, she was the babysitter. Sadly, she didn’t. ‘It’s Emma,’ I told her.
There was a short laugh. ‘Hello, Emma,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering how you were doing.’ I heard the glug glug glug of wine being poured, and I remembered how much we had drunk on our evening together.
‘I’m doing OK,’ I said lightly. I decided not to allude to her visit, which still rankled enormously. Our situation was beyond absurd and neither of us was the villain. I reminded myself that the fact that she had fooled me reflected worse on her than it did on me. ‘How are you?’ I added.
‘Oh. You know. Single mother and all that. We’re getting by. You?’
‘Same.’
‘You’re still in France?’
‘For the moment. I’m putting the house on the market tomorrow. Then we’ll be back.’
‘Do you hear from Hugh?’
I was pained to hear him called by his real name. ‘Pretty much never. Do you?’
‘He takes Olly every other weekend. I don’t say a word to him. We make arrangements by email. I still can’t believe he did it. To all of us, I mean. I thought he was one of the good guys. That was why I married him. I don’t know about you but I’m kind of stuck at the outrage stage. I’m getting over it though. I’ve been on a couple of dates. It’s going to be OK.’ Her voice faltered and I knew that Jo was struggling. I pictured her on the other end of the phone, her blonde hair framing a sad face. Jo’s life, carefully constructed for safety and happiness, had crashed down, just as mine had. We had thought we were safe, but we weren’t. The day-to-day happiness had been an illusion.
‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said suddenly. ‘When you came. I mean, Jesus, I felt stupid.’
‘God, yes,’ she said immediately. ‘Sorry I was so manipulative. I know you must hate me for it. I couldn’t help myself.’
‘It just makes me see how naïve I was,’ I said. ‘I wish I could say now that I’d started suspecting something was wrong back then, but I didn’t have an inkling. I liked you. I didn’t doubt for an instant that you were a lost tourist. It’s humiliating.’ I took a deep breath. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more.’
‘I wish I had told you. I was a bit possessed. I had just about worked out what was going on, but I didn’t want to confront him because I knew he would deny it. And part of me was certain there would be a rational explanation. God knows what I was thinking, dragging Olly over there. It could have been disastrous. It was disastrous. I was expecting you to know everything. I assumed Hugh had a willing mistress. I was going to make a huge scene. Then I could see straightaway that you knew less than I did. I thought about telling you, but I was so caught up in the horror of it, and the fact that your little girl was the same fucking age as Olly, and everything that that implied. And I could barely imagine what you’d have said if I’d told you that your Matt and my Hugh were the same person. You’d have had me sectioned.’
I sighed. ‘I suppose I would. I flipped out afterwards too. You can’t predict how you’ll react when something like that happens.’
We talked, in a stilted way, for a while, and agreed that when I was back in England, we would meet up. Alice and Olly were going to have to know that they were brother and sister. They needed a relationship with each other. We could cut their father out of it.
We were being too mature. I would never like Jo. She would never like me. That was a friendship that could never get started. I wanted to stay in touch with her, though, purely because it would annoy Matt. I was certain that she felt the same way.
After I put down the phone, I wailed for half an hour. I was outraged for Alice. He spent every other weekend with his son. He had no contact whatsoever with his daughter. She missed him. I missed him. I hated him, hated him, hated him.
The house went back onto the market. I put it on for a vast amount more than I paid for it, at the estate agent’s suggestion. I was dealing with Ella, the same woman who had handled our purchase. She was small and kind and she was amazed to hear that Matt and I had parted. I spared her all the details.
‘It didn’t work out,’ I told her in what I hoped was a dignified manner, and I looked away as I felt her watching me.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
Ella was a little formal and self-conscious, because she was not at all comfortable with the camera. Rosie had handed over the end of the documentary to a colleague called Jim, who was dishevelled and who didn’t converse. That suited me. He hung around me, sizing situations up wordlessly. His job was simply to get the sale of the house on celluloid, to wrap things up. I had offered to do it myself, but Rosie had laughed.
Ella had only agreed to be filmed out of politeness, and after securing Jim’s agreement that her agency’s name would be shown. I wondered if she would see the finished programme. Then she would certainly find out, in graphic detail, what, exactly, ‘not working out’ involved.
She didn’t put up a For Sale board because I didn’t want Alice to know what was going on, if a board had gone up she would have demanded to know why it was there. We had so little passing traffic that it was hardly worth it anyway. Ella did, however, come over one crisp sunny day with a digital camera, and take endless photos for her website. Three days later, I looked it up and easily located my house. She had made it look pretty and desirable, and I was torn between pride and dread. I wanted to sell it easily because I needed to move away, but I half hoped no one would be interested.
Spring was arriving. This year, the weather was perfect: crisp, clear and warm. My house was almost perfect. One morning, I walked around the garden by myself. The electrician was indoors, fitting sockets and switches so that all the lights would work and the power would no longer fuse every day or two. I walked slowly, despite the chill. It was a bright day, and, far in the distance, I could see the hills that marked the very beginning of the Pyrenees, silhouetted against the sky. At the end of the garden were the bare fields. There were no leaves on the trees, just the tiny beginnings of buds. The barns were full of crates of walnuts and hazelnuts from our trees, and the freezer was full of apples and pears and plums and figs. I would need to cut the grass, soon, because it was beginning to grow again.
The chickens wandered around, pecking at the hard ground. I took the lid off the Tupperware container I was carrying, and emptied its contents onto the earth. Lenin came running and began pecking furiously at the limp lettuce leaves and leftover potatoes. Sarah came to join her, and though Lenin tried to fend her off, she failed. Finally, Emperor Zurg, always the last, ambled over, picked up a lettuce leaf, and carried it away to peck in peace. I liked the fact that my chickens had personalities. Lenin was always the leader, and Zurg always came last. I loved the fact that Sarah, the one I thought of as
my
chicken, was the balanced one. She was in the middle. She was named after my mother, yet she was normal.
My mother had seduced Geoff. I was constantly trying to imagine it. The idea made me laugh.
My wellies were glistening with the melting frost. I was wearing my black trousers. It was frustrating that I couldn’t afford to spend any more money on clothes. I would have loved a good pair of well-fitting jeans. If I had had such a thing, I would have worn them every day. As it was, my black trousers, black T-shirt and tight red cardigan made me look like a parody of a chic country woman.
The back of the house was unrecognisable. I wished Matt were here to admire it with me. Last winter it had looked bleak. The wall had been blank but for the back door and a dead creeper. Now five newly fitted windows, with pale blue shutters, looked out onto the garden. This was a welcoming, friendly house. The wall had been re-rendered, with the big stones at the corners and around the door left exposed. This was my dream home. I had created it, and now it was being snatched away. I vowed to enjoy it while I still had it.