And I want to say to him: but what about Vanessa? What about the fact that I knew her and Isobel didn’t? What about us, and the history that we have? All those parties and all those laughs when we were kids still . . . what about that?
But I don’t say it. I look at him, pacing about the flat, and I know that it isn’t the past that really matters to him. It is the now. It is his wife, his children. My little part in all this is not so important after all.
Eventually I can talk and listen no more and I have to go to bed. I pick up my overnight bag and take it to his bedroom, and now it sits on the floor there, beside the bathroom door, still equally out of place. I realize that I do not know on which side of the bed I should sleep, so I assume the left side, nearest to the bathroom. I am so tired now, to my very bones. I go into the bathroom to shower, and when I come out I can hear Simon talking on the phone.
‘It was dull as hell,’ he is saying, his voice miserable and flat. ‘I wish I hadn’t gone.’
The bedroom door is ajar. I creep over to it and I can see him, sitting on the arm of the sofa. He is hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees. The hand that isn’t holding the phone is rubbing at his head. He looks pale, and forlorn.
‘I miss you,’ he says. ‘I should have just come home instead.’ And then, ‘I will, yes. I’ll get the earlier train. I love you.’
I sit down on the edge of the bed. My heart is thumping and there is a cold, hard pressure deep inside me.
I love you
, he tells his wife, but he doesn’t love her so much that he couldn’t screw me. Anger, fast and fleeting, rushes into my head, but very quickly it is followed by fear. This is it. We are over, Simon and me. We are over, and I am pregnant.
I sit there for a long time, and he stays where he is too, long after he has said goodbye to his wife. The flat is silent. The clock up on the chest of drawers flashes past the minutes in neon green: 12.20, 12.21 . . . I dare not move. I can barely breathe. The pressure inside me spreads and grows into panic, fierce and raw.
What will I do?
I grip my hands in my lap, digging my nails into my skin, hurting, hating myself.
Eventually I hear him move, and he comes into the bedroom and stands there, just inside the door. His hands are in front of his chest, not folded, but loosely clasped, as if he is about to pray. I stare up at him, though my eyes are burning with hot and useless tears. His own face is anguished. He wants me to speak first, to bail him out and make this easier for him, but how can I? How can I just let him go?
‘Rachel,’ he says at last and his voice is thin and pleading. ‘I’m
sorry ..
.’
He opens his hands in a
what-can-I-do?
gesture. I stare at him. I cannot speak.
‘Please try and understand,’ he pleads, and I do understand. I understand that he does not want another baby. He does not want a broken home. He wants to keep his wife and children in Kingham, and for me now to disappear. It was an affair we had, that’s all. A fantasy; nothing more.
Nothing real.
‘I should go,’ I manage to say at last.
‘Rachel, you don’t need to go,’ he says. ‘It’s late. You’re tired.’ He comes closer to me and sits on the bed beside me. He puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me towards him. I lean against him, wooden, too numb to yield. He sighs into my hair. ‘I will support you,’ he says, and then quickly, in case I mistook his meaning, he adds, ‘while you . . . do what you have to do. If the . . . problem doesn’t go away.’
I close my eyes. I squeeze them tight. Inside my head I see with cinematic clarity every moment that I have spent with Simon, every look, every movement, every word exchanged. Already I am replaying it as I will, no doubt, replay it again and again, for evermore, torturing myself. And then, bizarrely, another image springs up, sudden, grotesque: I see my baby girl, but not as I usually imagine her to be, had she lived, with her brown eyes laughing and her cheeks all pink and fresh and plump. Oh no. I see her as a doll instead; a porcelain doll, brittle-faced and chipped, with empty dark holes where her eyes should have been.
We sleep side by side without touching. I didn’t think I would sleep, but exhaustion swoops down like a blanket, blotting me out. I wake up with a jolt in the early morning; for seconds I have forgotten everything, forgotten even where I am.
And then consciousness claws me back.
Simon is already up and dressed, clearly anxious to be gone. His travel bag is open on the bed and into it he is putting a book of some sorts, and a small, square package from Liberty. I watch him for a second before he looks up at me, and sees that I am awake. I sit up, pulling the duvet up over my chest. I am horribly aware of how unattractive I must appear, sleep-blurred and tear-stained, whereas he, of course, is as immaculate as ever.
‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he says, and I wonder if he was hoping to sneak off and leave me there. But would he want to do that; would he want to leave me in his flat on my own, now that it is over? And we have unfinished business. There is no avoiding that.
‘I can make you a coffee,’ he says, but he glances at his watch.
‘Don’t let me keep you.’
He flinches at my tone. ‘Rachel, I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to be like this.’ He looks at me beseechingly, but all he wants is for me to let him go. He zips up his bag, presses closed the lock. ‘We’ll talk,’ he says. ‘Next week. Things will be clearer then. This might all . . . go away.’
‘And would that make a difference?’ I ask bleakly, and I draw my knees up under the duvet and hug them to my chest. I cannot stop my body from trembling.
‘Don’t let’s part on bad terms,’ he says, but how does he expect us to part? With a shake of the hands and a pat on the back, and off we both go on our separate merry ways? It’s so easy for him.
‘What about Vanessa?’ I ask; I can’t stop myself.
For a moment he looks confused. ‘What about her?’ he asks, but then surely he sees the horror on my face, because he sits down on the bed for a second and touches my arm. ‘Rachel, I am glad you got back in touch,’ he says. ‘Meeting you again was . . . well, it meant a lot to me. Really, it did. But I have to think of my family.’
My throat is so tight I cannot speak.
He stands up again and looks at his watch, more obviously this time. ‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘But please, take your time. We’ll talk soon.’ And then he adds, as if he had just remembered, ‘Oh, but my housekeeper will be here soon. I think she normally arrives just before nine.’
And that is my cue to be gone, before then.
How strange it is, to be leaving this flat for the last time.
As though I am an automaton, I check the cupboard in the bathroom, his wardrobe, the drawers, the shelves in the living room; I need to be sure that I will remember every detail, every single detail, exactly as it is. I find that he has seven pairs of socks, neatly rolled in his drawer, and another five pairs in his laundry basket, along with an equal number of pants and shirts and various items of gym kit. He has two tickets for a show at the Lyceum in May in the letter rack on the shelf next to his hi-fi in the living room, and a bill for a recent trip to The Ivy. I do not want to find these, but I hunt, and I do. I also find a note from his precious daughter, folded in half and used as a bookmark in an old
A-Z
, stuck up on the top shelf, wedged in right at the end:
to Daddy
, it says.
I love you lots and lots and lots. From Charlotte.
It strikes me as strange that he would leave me here alone, for however short a time. He must know I will look. I can only think that he doesn’t care.
At half-past eight I am standing in front of that window, wallowing in the view. My heart, now, is a cold, hard place. I am merely observing, recording it all, locking it all in.
I am gone before the housekeeper arrives. Perhaps I even pass her, down on the South Bank. Maybe she is scurrying in as I am scurrying out; maybe I pass her among the early-morning tourists anxious to beat the queues, and the newspaper vendors, and the party-goers – some high still, some just coming down – staggering their way home through the shift workers and the office cleaners and all these other faceless, unknown people, hurrying by.
I walk against the tide, slowly, on legs of clay.
Jono and Andrew are out when I get home. It is just gone ten; I assume they will have gone swimming, as they often do on a Saturday morning if there are no school sports matches to attend.
I walk into the house, grateful for the silence. The familiar smell of my home hits me. I step over Jono’s shoes in the hall and Andrew’s briefcase and go straight upstairs, to my bedroom. And there I look in the mirror and see my face, pale and taut and haunted, my hair a wild, slept-on mess. I did not shower again this morning at Simon’s. When he had gone I stayed there in his bed, gripping my knees to my chest in a tight, hard ball for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. And then I quickly dressed, and made my last mental inventory of his things.
I collapse down on my bed now and close my eyes, just for a second. My heart is a heavy, leaden weight. I would like to sleep. I would like to sleep and sleep for a very long time and let all of this be gone, but how can I? Andrew will be back soon, with Jono. I need to compose myself. I need to cut out my heart, and carry on.
And so I drag myself together. I quickly shower, and dry my hair, and cover the pallor of my skin with make-up. And then I gather up an armful of washing from the basket and take it down to the kitchen, and stuff it into the machine. Andrew has cleared away the breakfast things, but left a trail of crumbs along the counter and an empty milk bottle, unrinsed, in the sink. The sight of the cream congealed around the rim of the bottle and the milky streaks on the glass makes me retch, but I cannot use the sink without moving the bottle; I turn on the tap, full blast, and water gushes into the bottle and splashes up and out again, spattering the metal of the sink with milky spray. My stomach clenches and heaves and I have to lean on the edge of the sink, gulping in air, waiting for the sickness to pass. And I’m angry then; angry that Andrew could just leave this bottle here for me to deal with. He knows I can’t stand milk at the best of times. And why does he half-clear up, but leave me the dirt? There is a splodge of jam on the surface just next to the sink – surely he must have seen it there. How hard is it to wipe the surfaces down, as I do, constantly?
And to me this is synonymous with other things. Andrew tends to his shed and his projects and his jobs that don’t need doing, and he neglects the things that matter, the things that really need care, that affect our daily lives. He neglected me, and the things that mattered to me.
That
is why this has happened.
He let it happen.
And how am I to carry on living with someone who simply didn’t care enough not to let me go? But what else can I do?
And as for the fact that I might be pregnant – I can’t even think about that. I can’t think of it as real: it is a cluster of cells at most, a hormonal glitch. Soon it will bleed its sticky way out of me and I will be as empty as before.
‘How was the film?’ Andrew asks, and my head whirrs and clunks, searching for a response. ‘The film,’ he says again. ‘How was it?’
I am crouched down by the washing machine, dragging out its tangled contents and transferring them to the basket. I make much of the task, and so avoid his eye. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a single film that is on at the cinema at the moment.
But Andrew isn’t going away.
I pick up the towels and swimming trunks that he so casually dumped down on the floor by the machine when he returned with Jono from their trip to the pool, and shove them into the now-empty drum. I need to stand because I have been crouching for too long, but I know that when I do stand I will be dizzy. Frantically I clutch at the momentary clear space in my head.
‘We ended up going to a little cinema in north London,’ I say, thinking quickly, thinking very, very quickly. ‘Saw some obscure Hungarian film.’
Hungarian?
Do they even make films in Hungary? ‘Janice’s choice,’ I add, as if that should say it all.
I think he’ll quiz me. He’ll at least ask what it was called, or what it was about, but instead he says, ‘Is Janice going to your parents’ tomorrow?’
My hand, on the dial of the washing machine, freezes. It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow, his seventieth. My mum has arranged a family lunch; even Janice can’t wriggle out of that one. I hadn’t forgotten, but I hadn’t made the connection in my head. Janice yesterday, and Janice tomorrow. How
stupid
of me.
‘Of course she is,’ I manage to say.
I try to ring Janice, but there’s no answer at her flat and her mobile goes straight through to voicemail. She’s probably with Paul or gone out for the day, but she’d have her mobile on surely? Yet I try her and try her, and each time it’s the same. I leave her messages to call me, but she doesn’t, and so I keep trying her again, but still she isn’t there. Panic swirls around inside me along with irritation, and frustration.
What am I going to say to her anyway?
Listen, Andrew thinks I was with you last night . . . Do me a favour, will you, and just say that the film was rubbish.
How can I ask her that?