Separate Lives (10 page)

I was inspecting Alex closely for a reaction but there wasn't much to go on, just a slight twitch and a pursing of the lips which, even for an expert in neuro-linguistic programming (which I wasn't), would have been virtually impossible to read. I vaguely recalled that, on the other hand, Alex had learnt a bit about NLP on some ghastly management-empowerment course, back in the days when that kind of stuff was considered not only desirable by the boss classes, but a sound investment. Anyway, though it
seemed an age before he replied it was probably a particularly filmic hyper-real half a second. Alex glanced up at me and made eye-contact. It was surprisingly intense. So much so, in fact, I had to look away.

“What ‘P'?”

I breathed deeply.

“Someone—presumably a woman—who sent you a text just before the party. Look, I'm sorry but your phone fell out of your jeans pocket when I was tidying and, uh, there it was. So shoot me.”

This sort of lighthearted “D'oh!” forehead-slapping and eye-rolling approach seemed like a good idea. Even if it didn't sound like me.

“P? Um, that'd probably be Pippa. A friend of Guy and Lisa's. Met her at their place that night I stayed for dinner the other week, remember? Anyway, you've met her. She works in Lisa's shop sometimes, used to be Lisa's agent, sold you that expensive dress you wore to the party?”

Pippa was that nice woman who'd
sold me the Hussein Chalayan dress
? I had to think on my feet because I could suddenly recall almost every minute of my half-hour in Name, and . . .

“Well OK, but it still doesn't explain why this Pippa is sending you soppy texts with kisses and smiley faces.”

“Actually, she was being supportive about me losing my job. She was suggesting that every ending is a . . . a . . . new beginning. I'd told her at Guy and Lisa's about loving photography and I think she was just saying, go for it. That's how I read it, anyway.”

“But this still doesn't add up. How did she know you'd lost your job? How did sodding Pippa know you'd lost your job before I did? Answer me that, Alex. I'm the mother of your children!”

I know; it sounded exactly like a scene from
'Enders
.

“Because . . . look, Soos, I'd spoken to her at work on Friday, OK? She called me at the office because I'd had a conversation with Guy and . . . and there was something I needed to ask her about. And something I need to ask you about, too, as it happens, when I can get my head round it. But because I'd also just lost my job we inevitably talked about that . . . and, y'know, she was helpful. People often are when they're not connected to a situation themselves. And she was full of advice, for chrissakes.”

“Hang on, hang on. That's when you sent me that text:
a man's gotta do
. Did you ‘do' Pippa, then? And what did you ‘need' to talk to her about? Did you ‘need' to get up to speed with the spring-summer collections?”

Yes, even I could see this was going nowhere fast, but what would you have done in the heat—and the heat was now suddenly white hot—of the moment?

“No, I did not ‘do' Pippa. You're being ridiculous. And selfish.”

Actually he had a point. I was being selfish.

Over the next several minutes, while adopting a calm, but just-this-side-of-patronizing tone, Alex told me that Pippa had overheard me arranging what had apparently sounded like “an assignation, a hook-up” with “somebody in a hotel,” and that “she'd told Lisa, after that weekend in Barcelona when she and Guy had got engaged,” and that Lisa told Guy. And Guy had told Alex, and Alex had called Pippa, ostensibly to find out what this was all about, but had then got sidelined by losing his bloody job.

And, during those few minutes, I was (thank God!) able to reassure him that:

A) Of course I wasn't having an affair. I hadn't had a conversation with anybody—Pippa had just got the wrong end of the stick. Because:

B) I'd been leaving a message for Alex, on his phone. Which was:

C) The same phone he'd already lost. But I wasn't to know that he'd lost it, was I? And so:

D) When I hadn't heard back from him that afternoon, I'd assumed he couldn't escape from the Germans and had just gone home and relieved Ruby and sorted the kids and, yes, spent a bit of time twirling around in front of the bedroom mirror in the Chalayan, and . . .

E) I had been more or less asleep by the time Alex had eventually got home, so . . .

F)
Of course I wasn't having a bloody affair
.

I mean, how laughably ridiculous an idea was that? Or rather, yes, maybe I had been trying to have an affair, if you could call an attempt to have a spontaneous date-night “fling” with your own partner an affair. And the irony of this was that I'd tried to do it because Alex had become so distant I was worried he might be having an affair. A worry that had of course been compounded by discovering the bloody text from “P” a week later, which had in turn haunted me for the golden wedding anniversary weekend during which Alex had been so incredibly distant, despite that thoughtful packet of Resolve. Anyway Alex's distance made perfect sense as soon as I knew he was trying to protect me from knowing about losing his job. And as for this Pippa person . . . who cared? As far as I was concerned she was now
Pippa who?

And so, improvising quickly, I said all this while Alex nodded and listened intently and didn't butt in. And with
the assistance of my excellent memory, and Alex's apparent compliance, I figured all of this messy stuff could be buried pretty easily. I was confident about that. After all, Alex had lost the bloody phone, hadn't he? And with it any “evidence?” It was a good day to bury bad news.

So that Sunday night, after I'd returned from Random and we'd had our surprisingly calm and measured and indisputably grown-up conversation, Alex was a very different Alex from the one I had left on Friday afternoon. The color was back in his cheeks and he seemed bright-eyed and optimistic. He said he'd gone to a brilliant match on Saturday with Guy, had had an excellent conversation with the Ball-Breaker in the early evening and nearly gone out for a drink with his closest work colleague, Tony (who had inherited the magazine marketing job from Philip, of Philip-and-Bridget, and who lived round the corner from us in Kensal Rise) but then he'd decided to stay in and eat pizza and watch
Match of the Day
instead. He told me how he'd spent far too much of Sunday in bed, just thinking . . . and how I had been right—the space had been good for us. Possibly even essential, because that space had suddenly, miraculously, put everything into perspective and helped him to see where his priorities lay.

And that night, for the first time in maybe eight or ten weeks, we'd made love—well, fucked, really. And it had been so good, not to mention a surprise, to recapture some of the urgent up-against-the-wall-now passion that had characterized the first few years of our relationship. Alex seemed to be alive again in a way that I found unexpectedly exciting. So unexpectedly exciting, in fact, that the Myla thong had made an equally unexpected reappearance from the back of the knicker-drawer. And when a sleepy Chuck had turned
up at the bedside while we were still in the early—and still conjoined beneath the duvet—sexual aftermath, clutching his bunny and blinking and saying, “I was woke up by big noises, Mummy. What was they?” Alex and I shared the warm collusive giggles (“
were
, darling. It's
what were they?
”) of the very-happily-coupled-thank-you, before returning Charlie to his bed.

I couldn't, in truth, recall being quite this content for ages. And even though nothing changed the fact that Alex had lost his job, he seemed . . . OK. Better than OK, frankly. Perhaps I should have questioned that, but what kind of self-sabotaging fool goes searching for problems when a sufficiency of problems generally proves to be perfectly capable of seeking you out all by themselves? That would be idiotic, wouldn't it? Well, either idiotic or . . . or what—sensible? Pragmatic?

Against this backdrop, then, our summer unfolded gently and evenly. In the last week of July and the first week of August we had our usual Cornwall fortnight staying in the piggery conversion near Perranporth (actually it was probably just a normal, if slightly low-slung barn, but for some reason, now lost in the mists, we had dubbed it “The Sty” the first time we'd rented it back when Lula was a toddler, and it had stuck). There, as usual, we celebrated both our summer babies' birthdays—Lula was born at the end of July, Chuck six days later—and settled into the easy rhythms of the English seaside holiday: namely, four glorious days of sun and sandcastles, rock-pools and pasties and rosé-soused sunsets and the kids falling asleep on our laps at dinner, followed by four days of torrential downpours, during which we would put off the (inevitable) trip to the Eden Project, before (inevitably) caving in on Rain Day Three. Once there,
we would struggle sweatily through the Rainforest Biome accompanied by half of northwest London, fail to find anything the children wanted to eat in the cafe at lunchtime, cough up too much cash too quickly in the gift shop (after which something would invariably get lost/broken before we'd even got back to the car) and then spend the following day regretting Our Eden Hell, far too exhausted to do anything other than stay in the house playing Hungry Hippos and Boggle and watching Disney DVDs. And then the sun would suddenly reassert itself and the whole cycle would begin again, for another week. Bliss, really.

So, by the end of the summer Alex and I had talked a lot about relocating to Random-on-Sea, having made a few hit-and-run visits with the kids in August, when we peered in estate agents' windows and ate chips on the windy, shingly beaches. By this time, of course, we had convinced ourselves we were moving out of London for all the “right” reasons—to start again, to paper over our domestic cracks, making the future a better, brighter, ozone-suffused place for us all.

We put the house up for sale in the second week of September and despite a sluggish property market we were under offer within three weeks. Our buyers were a lovely gay couple—two solicitors, Christopher and Christian—who hadn't been put off by the faint coffee stain on the Farrow and Ball. In turn, we knew that this meant we could still afford to buy a listed-and-stuccoed-and-corniced (with an embarrassment of garden, probably) Dream Home with hardly any mortgage. Which also meant that even with just one income and Alex's redundancy package we could afford to send Lula and Charlie to a prep school on the outskirts of Random, a school with a hundred acres of playing fields
and a maximum of eighteen kids in a class. So, finally, our very own Good Life was waiting to unfold inside (as soon as we found it) our Dream Home. Who wouldn't have been excited about that? Who wouldn't have turned a blind eye to all the signs and portents that hinted at an entirely different outcome for us all? It's a rhetorical question, mind you. No need to answer.

We had a party at home a few days before we completed on the sale and moved down to our wonky rental in Random. Mid-November felt like a strange kind of time to be moving away from our home and our friends—mutual and individual. Alex and I had always prided ourselves on not being smug marrieds. Not actually being married helped, obviously, but everybody close to us had long since stopped bothering to ask us why we weren't. Or maybe they'd just forgotten. Anyway, we'd always kept our own Venn diagram of friends, with the ones we both liked—couples of the equally un-smug variety, mostly—overlapping in the middle.

November is a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other sort of month—not yet Christmassy, yet post the Halloween-and-Bonfires autumn the kids love so much and which I wished hadn't been turned into such a relentless consumer-fest, with entire supermarkets re-vamped in the Halloween-themed livery of orange and black. I wasn't a fan of the trick-or-treat, which (I was tediously fond of pointing out, every single October, ad infinitum) had never existed in this country until
ET
had introduced it to us in the early 1980s. But anyway, here we were in the very last gasp of autumn, inviting our N&D round to say good-bye with bottles of wine and slices of homemade pizza and it was only when I found myself wedged into a corner with Tony from
marketing—whom I liked, but with whom relations had become ever so slightly strained since Alex's departure from the company—that I had one of those spooky, slow-motion, entirely-in-the-moment yet slightly-out-of-body experiences that made me think, “Fuck! What are we doing? These are our people, this is our 'hood. Where are we going?”

And then it passed as quickly as it had arrived. The turnout was good, too, while all those who hadn't been able to make it had very plausible excuses. These included Guy and Lisa, who though our “closest”—at least in terms of distance—family members, had dropped off our radar a bit in the last few months. There were obvious reasons for this, what with our respective summer holidays and Guy and Lisa both being caught up in the Pippa-and-the-overheard-conversation debacle, though I had made a point of having lunch with a very contrite Lisa shortly after Alex had explained things.

“Look, Soos,” Lisa had said after we'd both made small talk about kids and pushed lettuce leaves around our plate and then drunk a glass of wine slightly too quickly, sometime in early July, “Pippa is a great girl, but she's also got a bit too much time on her hands, and stuff . . . But the point is, I know it was a genuine misunderstanding. I know she regrets it. She's had a tough time for a few years so we've cut her a bit of slack, but obviously that was never meant to involve—”

“Potentially fucking up my relationship with Alex? Potentially fucking
him
? Well that's very loyal, Lisa, but the fact remains that she not only weaseled her way into Alex's confidence but, as far as I can tell, exploited his vulnerability. And let's face it, she's a very good-looking single woman and, on an entirely un-sisterly level, she might be good at
selling me expensive frocks but I don't want her anywhere near the father of my children.”