The Stepmother (9 page)

“Thanks for sticking around. It does make life easier and I've got something to tell you,” I said.

“So have I, Bea. I've got something to tell
you
.” Suddenly he seemed so excited, so keen, that I relaxed. I had read the signs right. Those last slow dances we'd had as the party ended had meant to him what they'd meant to me. We should be together. Starting now.

“Well, you first,” I said, relishing this newly discovered bliss.

“I've met someone.”

“I know. Me too…Um, what? Sorry.” I swallowed hard.

“That's great. Who?”

“Wait. What? Start again. You've met…” I willed something different to come out of Jimmy's mouth.

“Oh, Bea, she's fantastic. I know you two will be friends.”

I doubted that.

“I didn't think it was possible, you know how I…Anyway, she's just wonderful and I feel blessed. She fell into my life. I'd thought, Never again, right? You don't get it twice! But, Bea, she's so funny and strong, and intelligent.”

“How old is she?”

Jimmy laughed. “That's your first question? She's twenty-two and she comes from Latvia.”

“You've got to be kidding!”

“Yes, Bea, I'm kidding. I wouldn't do that to you.”

I don't care if she's fifty-six and comes from Bournemouth—you bloody are!

“She's thirty-eight and, Bea…” He paused. My stomach lurched. “I want to marry her.”

The muscles in my jaw collapsed.

“I know, I know, a man of my age but, my God—”

“Is she pregnant?”

“Bea!”

“Sorry…This is all a bit sudden.” That's a fucking understatement! Marriage! Be civil, Bea, be civil. Your only way out of this is civility. It won't last and you'll be there to pick up the pieces.

“What does she do?”

“She works for a record company.”

Oh, Christ. She's cool.

“The girls adore her.”

Record company. All skinny jeans and pumps. “What?” This time I couldn't disguise the frown. “The girls have met her?”

“Not really, I mean, no, I mean—”

“Jimmy, either the girls have met her or they haven't.”

“Not knowingly, is what I mean.”

I heard my voice harden. It brought back a million miserable memories. “How many times have they not knowingly met her?” The charade. The fucking bullshit charade! The deals, the scripts, the long nights entertaining those ever-thirsty creative types. All bullshit. Years of it.

“Twice, a few times, hardly at all…”

“They've hardly met her but they adore her?” Cold. Hard. Steel gripped my heart and stole my voice. Rein it in, I pleaded with myself, but I couldn't. Mess with me, don't mess with my children. They are mine.

“You've been telling me to get out there,” said Jimmy.

I lied.

“I'm really…Obviously I'm a bit shocked but, er, but, um, I'm pleased for you.” Every word stuck in my throat. I wanted to lean over the table and grab him by the collar and scream in his face, “Don't fuck this up! We have a chance of making this right!”

“Thanks, Bea. You'll love her. A real girl's girl.”

I very much doubted that. On both counts. The wine bottle was emptying faster than I could recall drinking it. I swallowed a mouthful. “You should have told me before the girls met her.”

“It wasn't planned, I promise.”

I didn't care. I wanted something to hang him on, them on. Her on. “How much have the children been exposed to her?”

Jimmy laughed. “You make her sound like a disease.”

You said it!

“Sorry.” What was I apologizing for?

“They've never been alone together. We just bump into each other in the park sometimes.”

“She has kids?”

“No. Never been married.”

Oh, pure…How sweet. Untainted. No fucking stretch marks. Bitch. I swallowed back the hate-filled words with more wine.

“But she's great with kids.”

I smiled with gritted teeth. Until the ring is on her finger. Haven't you read the stories? Cinderella! Snow White! I must remember to dig those old books out. Late thirties. Still time to breed. She'll present you with a shiny new baby. God, a boy! Next thing, she'll have our girls packed off to boarding school and sleeping in the kitchen during the holidays!

“Thank you for being so pleased for me.”

Was I still smiling? Inconceivable! The dog whistle was blasting an alarm to wake the dead, yet he believed my smile. Had ignored my tone, more like. He was always good at that.

“I thought it might be odd telling you, but we've been getting on so well lately, the mates I always hoped we'd become once, well, you know. I've felt so close to you. We've been having such great, honest chats…”

That was enough. I couldn't take any more. All those things I'd been saying, which I'd thought so obvious, had passed him by. I'd been having a one-sided romance in my head. I feigned a wide yawn and stretched out my arms for good measure. Seemed he could read that message.

“You're tired. I'd better go.” Jimmy stood up. So I stood up. He walked around the table to hug me. It broke my heart.

“Hey, you haven't told me about your new—”

“Another time,” I said.

“There are no secrets between us.” The temperature dropped a couple of degrees. I had to get him out of the house now. Before I did something really awful and made his statement true. “At least tell me his name?”

“It's not serious, Jimmy.”

“Okay.” Jimmy smiled at me, the same beatific smile I'd seen at Luke's fortieth. I knew then, as sure as I would eat a packet of Hobnobs the moment the front door shut, that when Jimmy had been listening to Faith's speech about Luke, his mind had been on a thirtysomething
record producer with no stretch marks and a skinny arse. Not, as I had thought, on me. Stands to reason. Why would he have been thinking about me? Who the hell was I kidding? Look at me!

“You didn't ask her name.” He had turned back, halfway down the path.

Because I don't want her to have one, I thought. “I forgot in all the excitement.”

He seemed to be waiting for something.

“Um, what's her name?”

He broke into another smile. “Tessa King,” he said.

So? What was he smiling about? That wasn't such a great name. “How lovely.”

“She is. I can't wait for you to meet her.”

I waved him off with a smile that tore my cheeks, then shut the door and drifted into the kitchen. I opened the cupboard door like a robot and removed the packet of chocolate Hobnobs my children adored. In turmoil, I sat at the kitchen table while my family drifted into deep, peaceful sleep. I was too late to make it up to them. Too damn late.

I stared at the packet, turning it round and round in my hand. A tear splashed onto the cheap pine; I wiped away its successor angrily. I couldn't fool myself anymore. The biscuits weren't going to help me. If I ate them, I was beaten…And I wasn't ready to be beaten yet. I had three children to think of. Our DNA was intertwined in them. I had twenty years in the bag. I was the Bean in Jimbean. Another tear fell, then another. Tessa King? Tessa King? I poured myself more wine and let the tears spill out of me. Who the hell was this Superwoman, Tessa King?

M
Y FINGERS WERE TAPPING MY THIGH, AND WHEN
I
SLAPPED MY HAND
down hard to make them stop, my foot took over. Nervous energy ran through me like acid on sheet metal. My insides fizzed. James was somewhere in Kentish Town, telling his ex-wife about me and thereby making me “official.” I didn't know if I was excited or petrified.

A passing waiter refilled my glass. I looked at my watch. He was half an hour late. I drank. Half an hour…Was that good? Or bad? Would I be welcomed into the fold? Or banished to Siberia? James had never said much about the failure of his marriage, except that Bea had left him. More than that I hadn't wanted to know. As far as I could tell, it was a pretty good separation, and I knew he saw his beloved girls as often as he could. All he'd said was that he'd never expected to fall in love like this again, and he felt blessed. What was the point in raking over old ground once a man had said that to you? What had been had been. What would be was ours to discover. It hadn't been my intention to fall in love with a divorced man who was pushing fifty, had salt-and-pepper hair and three children. One a teenager, for God's sake. But I
had. He'd made it impossible not to. Once he'd relented, of course, and finally taken my calls.

I sensed him moments before I felt the blast of fresh air around my feet. James removed his coat, handed it to a waiter, and, beaming, joined me at the table. It was good news, I could tell from his face.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he said, leaning down and kissing my collarbone.

The touch of his lips sent a shockwave to my rude bits. I shuddered, grabbed him around the neck, and pulled him down for another kiss. He fell forward and sank into a crouch. “How did it go?”

“Great,” he said, eyes locked on mine.

“Really?” I was shocked by how relieved I was to hear the words.

“I told you,” he said, running his hand over my head, through my hair, over my cheek.

I leaned into it. “I thought she'd want you back.” This was true. But I hadn't realized it until he'd walked into the restaurant with a smile.

James laughed. “No.”

“I would.”

“I'd prefer it if you simply never let me go.”

I took his face in my hands. “Never.”

“I love you, Tessa King.” He was shaking his head, as if flabbergasted by his own good fortune. “I really, really do.”

I'd spent my life reading crappy novels about people falling in love, and hurling them across my bathroom (preferred reading location) in fury as another grateful maiden's heart skipped a beat. But when James looked at me like that, and spoke to me like that, my heart—dear God, they'd been right all along—skipped a beat. I leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. “Good,” I said. “That makes it even.”

He groaned, getting up. I decided to take it as a sign of intense longing rather than an aging arthritic knee. He sat down opposite, and immediately cleared a path through the glasses and carnations to hold my hands. For a moment we sat there looking at each other. It felt like the most normal thing in the world, to stare at someone's face and get lost in it. But I knew it wasn't normal. I knew I was very, very lucky. And to think I'd come within a whisper of ruining the whole thing.

It will go down in
Schott's Almanac
as one of the most disastrous dates. Ever. It had started well. Dinner. Cocktails. Nonstop chat.

Kissing…Oh, the kissing. A hotel (my idea). A bath (his). A lot more kissing. Some soap. Quite a long time being dried. And finally, at dawn, sex that felt as natural as skinny-dipping. And later the next day waiting for him to return to the cocoon of excitement, desire, and a freshly made bed. Then the dreaded phone call from a “friend” to warn me that the man I felt I'd just shown my soul to was married with kids. I had been played. Life was a bit of a trial back then, and to me James was the honest judge my case had been missing. When I heard he was just another adulterous womanizer, I surrendered. Beaten. It wasn't as if I was a novice.

I knew life wasn't fair, because if it were, my mother wouldn't have MS. I knew life wasn't fair, because my friend Claudia, the most maternal woman I knew, couldn't have children. I knew. What I didn't know was that the devil played with loaded dice. He threw bad news onto bad luck onto bad timing, which usually resulted in some seriously bad judgment. That sort of onslaught leaves a person feeling they're being singled out, self-pity turns to anger, and anger causes mayhem. Well, hearing James was married was one bit of bad news too many. A switch tripped in my psyche. I left the hotel and any hope of a happy ending behind me.

Apart from a couple of disastrous dates while he and Bea were separated, James later told me, he hadn't slept with anyone since the divorce had come through. He'd been as bowled over by the night as I'd been and had rushed back to the hotel after his last meeting, thinking about nothing other than the feel of my skin on his. Anxious to discover whether what had happened had been a one-off or, as he hoped, that something extraordinary was taking place, he had let himself into our room only to find it empty. He said he told himself I'd popped out for coffee, but he knew I hadn't, because there wasn't a note. And if I was the girl he'd thought I was, I would have left one. And he was right. He called and called until he had to face the fact that I had bolted.

Then he saw all my extras on the hotel bill. And the last vestiges of concern for my safety (he could only assume that something must have happened to me or someone in my family) were annihilated. I was a nutter. Pure and simple. A nasty little money-grabbing one at that. He vowed I would be wiped from his memory. But the trouble was, over the following weeks, I kept creeping back into his thoughts. There were
days, he had told me, when he had wanted to read about a body being discovered, or an exposé that the hotel was drugging its guests and selling them to the sex-slave market. Anything to excuse my behavior. But eventually he discovered I was alive and well. Well, alive, anyway.

“What are you thinking about?” asked James now.

“How terrifyingly close I came to losing you.” That was the weird thing about my relationship with him. When we finally did see each other again and everything was explained, some silent pact was forged between us. Honesty was essential. Lives had been ruined because of misunderstandings. Mine would have been. I was never going to feel like this about anyone else. That I knew. I wouldn't have known what I was missing out on. I hoped I would've made the best of it, but now that I'd felt it…A hot tear prickled my eyelid. Stupid girl, I thought, wiping it away. The only terrible thing about loving someone so much was how scared you felt at the thought of losing them. I was as vulnerable as a newborn, yet safer than I ever had been.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “I love you.”

He smiled.

“So, tell me what happened,” I said, pulling myself together. “I want every detail.”

“Let's order first.” James let go of my hand and picked up the menu. Now that he was here, and my nerves had relinquished their octopus hold on my stomach, I was ravenous. I went for two courses with every intention of tucking into some cheesecake for dessert. When the waiter left to fetch another bottle of wine, I leaned in for the blow-by-blow.

“How was your day?” he asked. “Didn't you have a big signing?”

“Don't change the subject. Come on, I want to know.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“James!”

“Okay, okay. We put the kids to bed. It was all very nice. Then we went downstairs, had a glass of wine, chatted a bit. Bea told me she'd met someone, which I thought had happened, because—”

“She wouldn't let you in on Monday.”

“Yeah. I figured she didn't want to tell me over the intercom.”

“Who is it?”

“We didn't get that far, because I started blathering on about you and how wonderful you are.”

I sat back in my chair. “And she really didn't mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You said she was in a bad way, though, when you couldn't meet me at the theater because you had to go to Harrods.” I'd been pissed off at the time. I'd booked the tickets ages ago.

James shifted uncomfortably.

“That was different. I didn't want to tell you, because, I don't know, it feels…well, Amber asked me not to tell anyone. But Bea hadn't been eating. She's trying to lose a bit of weight, not that she needs to—well, maybe she does a bit, but she beats herself up about it and I wish she wouldn't, because it makes it worse. Anyway, she looks great now. Really great. Amazing willpower she has.” Okay, that was probably enough of the amazing Bea. “She was meeting her mother, who she doesn't have the best relationship with—”

“That's sad.”

“She never liked me.”

“Stupid dragon.”

“And they'd been shopping for hours for Luke's fortieth…”

Luke's birthday party had been the event that had precipitated my “coming out.” James had wanted to take me, and if I were honest, my categorical refusal to entertain the idea hadn't even been skin-deep. I was desperate to go. But even I knew that turning up unannounced at a family party was a bad idea. He needed to do this right for the girls, and that meant doing it right by their mother. My decency was entirely Machiavellian. My future was at stake.

“…It was probably about money. Apparently, she wouldn't come out. Basically, Bea fainted or something like that and it scared her. Scared me too.”

“Why do they argue about money?” I asked, trying to fill in the bits where I hadn't been listening.

James grimaced. “It's complicated.”

“Okay.” I waited a second, but he didn't elaborate. So I changed the subject. To me. “Did she want to know anything about me?”

“'Course. She asked masses of questions. What you do, whether you'd met the girls, how old you were.”

“Sounds more like an interrogation.”

“Now you're being ridiculous.”

“Sorry. You didn't tell her I'd met the girls?”

“Only in passing.”

“Good. It would have freaked her out if she knew we'd been to the zoo and things.”

James tore open a packet of breadsticks. “I didn't go into details.”

“She'd think we'd been cavorting behind her back.”

“Tessa, she's not like that.” He was laughing at me. “Honestly, she's a straight-up lady. Funny, kind, and the best mother in the world—though, of course, she's too modest to accept a compliment. She grows her own vegetables, for God's sake. You'll like her,” he said.

He sounded so sure. Why did I feel that pinch of doubt?

 

W
E WENT TO BED AND
for once my mind didn't turn to sex. I had eaten far too much, so my belly was distended and uncomfortable. All I could do was lie next to him and groan. That crap about women wasting away with love was a big fat myth. Along with all the others peddled during our lifetime about handsome princes and happily ever afters. I'd done nothing but eat since I'd got together with James, and it was wreaking havoc on my waistline. Luckily, the amount of horizontal jogging I was doing was just about keeping the scales in check.

In the beginning, I feared I was confusing lust with love, but because James had the kids a lot, there were long weekends and half-terms when I didn't see him at all. After they went to bed, he'd call me and we'd talk long into the night. There had been some nights when I just lay with the phone next to my ear and listened to him breathe. On others, I'd writhe around with longing as he told me the things he would have done had he been there. And one night I got into my Mini, drove over to Hampstead, sneaked up to his room, made mad, silent, passionate love, then left again. But the thought of his kids waking up scared the shit out of me, so we never did it again. Now I wouldn't have to. James
was going to tell the girls about me and then, well…we'd see what happened next. But I had a fairly good idea.

“James?” I whispered in the dark, an hour or so later. There was no reply. “James?” I said, a little louder. Nothing. I prodded him.

“Huh?”

“You awake?”

“No.”

“Did she break your heart?”

I felt him deflate and regretted the question. But I had been lying awake, thinking. He had never pretended he hadn't felt like this before. I was glad. I was glad that he was the sort of man to marry a woman he truly loved. And I knew she'd left him. What worried me suddenly was not the thought of Bea wanting James back now that I was on the scene, but James wanting Bea back because someone else was.

“Tessa, do you remember I told you when we first had lunch that we wouldn't go over old relationships?”

“Yes. I thought it was because you were hiding a wife and two kids.”

“Three.”

“I only knew about the younger two.”

“I remember. Lainy and Martha and a wife called Barbara.”

“I was misinformed,” I said.

“Horribly, as it turned out.”

I reached over, found his hand, and squeezed it. Neither of us enjoyed going over that ground. The stench of my bad behavior could have polluted the most fragrant moment.

“My wife left me and took my kids. I wouldn't say I was jumping for joy.” I felt him prop himself up and could see his faint outline in the dark. His hair was all over the place, like it was in the morning. He looked like Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
before he'd showered. Maybe I didn't want this conversation, after all.

“The truth is, I'm ashamed to say I didn't realize things had got as bad as they had,” said James. “I certainly never thought we'd split up. I suppose I naively thought that three children were enough to keep us together. But when she took the girls to her mother's house, I knew things were critical. She'd rather starve than accept charity from her mother. She wouldn't go there because she wanted to. She'd only go
there because she had no alternative. Apparently, I was no alternative.”