The Lying Game (30 page)

‘You saw Florence? When?’

‘Tuesday, before I went to Manchester. She didn’t tell you?’

Harriet shook her head. ‘It’s been a difficult few days.’

‘Christ. Of course. I should’ve asked before. How’s your father? Florence said the poor old bugger had to have another procedure—’

She smiled for the first time since she’d arrived. ‘He’s doing much better. The surgery went well, and they actually let him come home yesterday. He’s not out of the
woods yet, but they think they got all of it this time. He’s still got to go through chemo, but the odds are looking so much better than they were.’

‘Thank God,’ Oliver said feelingly. ‘Send him my best, won’t you?’

‘He’d like to see you,’ Harriet said. ‘If you’ve got time.’

‘He would?’

‘For Heaven’s sake, Oliver. Regardless of what’s happened between us, you know how much he loves you. The son he never had and all that nonsense. You owe him more than to run
away and hide.’

‘Does he . . . has he . . .’

‘Of course he knows. That story was impossible to miss,’ she said dryly. ‘Dad’s an urban fox, Oliver, not a country mouse. He’s also seventy-six and the father of
four daughters. He doesn’t judge. I’d stay out of Mummy’s way, though,’ she added. ‘She’ll have your balls on a plate if she catches you.’

‘Appreciate the heads-up,’ Oliver mumbled.

He knew better than to think the apparent détente between them meant anything. Just because Harriet had finally returned his umpteen phone calls, just because she’d agreed to meet
him and sat conversing pleasantly with him now, didn’t mean anything had changed. He knew his wife. She did anger as efficiently and coolly as she did everything else.

The two of them sipped their tea, looking no doubt like any other happily married couple enjoying a Saturday morning brunch without the kids.
If only that were true,
he thought
desperately. He felt like a tethered lamb being circled by a wolf, waiting for it to pounce.

‘I’m taking the children back home to Vermont next week,’ Harriet said abruptly. ‘School starts in less than a fortnight. I need to get them settled after . . . after
this summer.’

There it was. Straight for the jugular, too. He’d known somewhere in the back of his mind that this would happen. The kids couldn’t stay in London for ever, but he still felt
sucker-punched at being told the news casually, as if he were an outsider. He’d only been gone a week! Christ, there was so much they had to sort out, so much he wanted not to think
about.

Briefly, he closed his eyes. ‘Harriet, if there was something I could say that would make any difference, believe me, I’d say it—’

‘Try,’ Harriet said.

It took him a moment to realize she was serious. For the first time in his life, he was speechless. He’d spent the last seven days imagining what he’d tell her if she’d just
give him a chance to explain, apologize, plead his case – and now that he had it, he didn’t know where the fuck to begin.

Suddenly he was scrambling frantically to make up ground. ‘Oh God, Harriet, you have to know how sorry I am. If I could take it back, I would. I’d give everything I own to have
things back the way they were.’

Her expression was unreadable. He had no idea if he was getting through to her or just making things worse.

‘I love you so fucking much. I’d take a bullet for you, you know that.’ His eyes stung suddenly, but he didn’t care. ‘I’ve been so damn stupid, but I never
stopped loving you, Harry, not for a moment. I know how much I’ve hurt you. I know you’re going to find it hard to trust me again, but I swear to you, I swear to God on our kids’
lives, if you give me a second chance I will never, ever let you down again.’

She swallowed. ‘And Zoey?’

‘Zoey was a stupid, idiotic mistake! You know that! I love you. Please, Harriet. If you believe nothing else, believe that.’

‘Oh, shit, Oliver. Shit.’

He waited, his heart pounding.

‘It would be so much easier if you were a philandering bastard,’ she said painfully. ‘I’ve spent the past week trying my best to hate you, and I just can’t.
I’m so fucking angry I could spit tacks, but I can’t hate you. It’s just . . . I thought we were above all this kind of thing – cheating, affairs, all the rest of it. The
lying.
I’m not saying I haven’t made mistakes too. I should have told you about that stupid night with Ben a long time ago. I should never have gone behind your back to find
Nell. But I didn’t deserve this!’

‘No,’ he said hoarsely. ‘No, you didn’t deserve this.’

‘How did we end up like this, Oliver? I thought this kind of thing happened to other couples, not to us. Not to
Oliver and Harriet.’

‘It was me, it was all my fault.’

‘The affair, yes. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum.’

‘None of this was down to you.’

‘Oliver,’ she said, regarding him squarely, ‘if we’re to have any chance of putting this back together, we both have to be honest. I have to own my part in this
too.’

‘Do we?’ he asked. ‘Have a chance?’

For a long moment, she said nothing. He could feel the blood rushing in his ears as if he had vertigo, as if he was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the rocks below. She was his
life. It was as simple as that. He loved her now more than he’d ever have thought possible; more than he had the day he married her, more even than the day she made him a father. He loved her
with every fibre of his being. Whether she needed him or not suddenly no longer mattered. He needed
her
just to breathe.

‘Can I trust you?’ she said finally.

His heart contracted. He had to tell her. He didn’t want to – oh Christ, he didn’t want to tell her – but how could he ask her to trust him unless he did? Lying to her by
omission would destroy any chance they might ever have to rebuild their marriage – if not now, then later. But if he told her, he risked losing her anyway. She might forgive him the affair,
but a
baby?
How could any wife be asked to forgive that?

‘Zoey’s pregnant,’ he said quietly.

He could see her withdraw from him, close down, frost over. She didn’t move, but suddenly she seemed a thousand miles away.

‘Then she’s won,’ Harriet said.

‘No! She hasn’t
won!
Of course she hasn’t won! This makes no difference to
us,
to how I feel about you!’

Harriet gave him a cool, measured look. ‘Oh, Oliver. Of course it makes a difference. It makes all the difference in the world. Zoey won’t survive on her own, not again. She
can’t. She doesn’t have it in her. She’ll cling to Nell like a drowning man. You know it as well as I do. If you don’t go back, Nell won’t have a chance. And you
won’t forgive yourself for doing that to her, and nor will I.’

He knew, the moment she said it, that she was right. Had known, deep down, ever since Zoey had told him she was pregnant.

She’d won.

He missed his stop on the tube and had to double back, sitting in the sour, stifling air hundreds of feet below the ground, wondering if there was any point in ever returning
to the surface again.

He had no idea where he’d go after he collected his things from Zoey’s. He couldn’t keep up this pretence any longer. No matter what Harriet said, he didn’t belong with
Zoey. He could never love her, not in the way she needed and deserved. He’d do everything he could to help her and the baby – he’d stay in London, give her all the emotional and
financial support she needed. But that was all.

She didn’t answer the door when he knocked. He knew she must be in; he could hear music playing in the kitchen. He knocked again, harder this time, and when she still didn’t answer,
he cupped his hands and peered through the window.

Suddenly he was hammering on the back door. ‘Zoey! Zoey!’

The door didn’t yield. He flipped over the mat, and grabbed the spare key.
Who’d burgle me?
Zoey had said, laughing, when he’d pointed out the singular lack of
originality in her hiding place.
They’d take one look at this place and probably leave me a fiver.

Shoving the door open, he forced his way through cardboard boxes and plastic bags into the kitchen, where Zoey lay sprawled on the floor. She was still breathing – shallow, hoarse gasps
that filled him with a mortal fear. Her skin was waxy and clammy to the touch, her lips blue.

‘Zoey! Oh, dear Christ, Zoey!’ He groped in his pocket for his phone as he pulled her into his arms. ‘Come on, sweetheart, hang in there. It’s going to be OK. Christ,
somebody answer!’

Seconds later, the operator picked up. ‘Emergency, which service do you require? Fire, Police or Ambulance?’

‘Ambulance!’ he cried, rapidly barking directions into the phone. ‘Please, hurry! I’m losing her!’

Zoey’s grey eyes focused on his face. ‘Nell,’ she said clearly.

He dropped the phone, cradling her against him. ‘I’ll find her,’ he promised desperately. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after her. You just have to hold on, Zoey.
Help’s coming. Just hold on a little bit longer.’

Her eyes fluttered shut. And for the first time in years, Oliver prayed.

It was Richard who’d taken it hardest, Harriet thought as she watched him file into an empty pew across the aisle with his mother. The poor man looked like he’d
been hit by a bus. Zoey had cuckolded him, publicly humiliated him, destroyed his dreams of a wife and family, taken away the child he’d raised as his own for nearly a decade; and yet here he
was at her funeral, utterly broken and lost without her.

Nell turned to her. ‘I think I should go and sit with him.’

‘Of course,’ she said, trying not to mind.

Nell slipped out of their pew and into Richard’s. She put her hand on his shoulder as if she were the adult and he the child. He turned to her, stricken, resting his head lightly against
hers, his shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs. On his other side, his mother put her thin arm round him, and the three of them clung together like shipwrecked souls.

The organist began to play ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, and everyone in the small church stood. It seemed Zoey hadn’t been one for religion; according to Nell, she’d
believed god – ‘with a small g’ – was in everything, from daisies to people, which probably made her spiritually closer to Buddhism than anything else. But she’d been
baptized a Catholic, and Harriet was a firm believer in the necessity of ritual to mark the important milestones of life and death. So Oliver had spoken to the Catholic priest in Zoey’s
parish, a kind and empathetic missionary from the Ivory Coast, who’d promised to remember the tiny unborn soul of Zoey’s lost baby in his private prayers, hadn’t asked once about
the regularity of her attendance at church, and had incorporated Nell’s request for the funeral service to be ‘something Mum wouldn’t mind being seen dead at’ into the more
conventional framework of the Catholic Requiem Mass.

Which meant that after the first reading from Luke’s Gospel, Nell stood up and read Auden’s anguished lament for all the clocks to be stopped in a clear, unwavering voice. She
didn’t cry, though she left few in the small congregation with dry eyes. Many of those who had turned out were friends of hers as well as Zoey’s; among them was a young boy of about
seventeen who bore such an uncanny resemblance to Florence, Harriet dropped her hymnbook when she saw him.
That must be Ryan James,
she thought in astonishment, watching him slip into the
church and hide self-consciously behind a pillar. The son of Zoey’s first love, Patrick, and therefore Florence’s half-brother. How strangely they were all linked.

Richard read the eulogy. He broke down several times, especially when he talked about Zoey’s zest for life, and how it was now up to Nell to keep her memory alive.

And then the organist played ‘Jerusalem’, and six pallbearers, led by Oliver and Richard, picked up Zoey’s coffin – recycled cardboard, as Nell had insisted – and
led the way outside to where the hearse was waiting. Zoey had wanted to be cremated, Nell said, her ashes scattered ‘everywhere I was ever happy’, but Nell didn’t want anyone to
go to the crematorium. ‘We’ll say goodbye to her in church, and then we’ll all go home and remember her alive, not stuck in a cardboard box disappearing behind a curtain like
something from
The Wizard ofOz.’

Harriet had offered to host the wake at her parents’ house, but Nell insisted everyone should come back to Zoey’s cramped flat in Islington. ‘Of course there’ll be
room,’ she’d said in the face of Harriet’s practical objections. ‘We can all spill out on the streets if we have to, like we did for the Royal Wedding and the
Jubilee.’