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Mike felt himself flush.
‘Oh God, don’t tell me you resorted to flowers from Netto. That’s grounds for divorce!’
He sat back and raked a hand through his hair. ‘To be honest, I’ve done nothing. Olivia hasn’t said anything and I thought it might make things worse.’
So, Judith put him straight with her round, open, friendly face. She didn’t know what the problem was, but doing or saying nothing was not an option. ‘Venus and Mars and all that crap. It’s true, men and women don’t understand each other. But speaking on behalf of womankind, while chocolates and flowers don’t solve anything, they certainly help. From the way you look, my guess is that you need to clear the air. So go home early, surprise her, tell her that you love her.’
So here he is. Olivia turns from the sink just as he reaches her. She looks worn and so very pale.
‘For you,’ he says, handing over a bunch of yellow roses with a wry smile. ‘Not very imaginative, I know. It’s just a token to say sorry.’ He kisses her cheek and can sense the stifled sniggers of his girls sitting at the wooden table behind him. ‘Can we talk later?’
Olivia smiles faintly, nods and takes the flowers.
‘Aren’t you going to snog?’
‘Hannah!’
‘Well that’s what they do on the TV.’
‘I think you mean kiss, young lady,’ Olivia says. ‘I’ll put these in water.’
As Olivia moves away, Mike looks at Rachel, his face a question, but she shrugs her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispers.
‘Well, these are for you two,’ he says, pulling out two chocolate bars from his pocket and hiding them behind his back. ‘Which hand? You go first, Hannah.’
Hannah pulls at his right sleeve. ‘That one.’ He brings out an empty hand. Hannah starts to cry. ‘That’s mean, Daddy. It’s not fair if Rachel gets two!’
Confectionery distribution woes salved, Mike sits down, pushes away the empty plates and studies his girls as they eat their treats. They’re so different in looks and build and in chocolate-bar-eating technique, he thinks with a smile. No black dog today; he feels a sudden lightness, a sense of expectation, almost like optimism. I’m lucky, very lucky, he thinks. I must remember this more often.
‘So, how was school?’ he asks Hannah. ‘Do you still fancy Dylan whatshisname?’
‘I do not!’
‘Yes, she does!’
‘How do you know? You’re not at St Theresa’s any more. You go to Loreto where they all snog and smoke!’
‘Well, I don’t, you idiot.’
Olivia is back in the room. ‘Don’t call her an idiot, Rachel.’
‘That’s hardly fair, Mum. She just—’
‘Life’s not always fair, Rachel,’ Olivia replies, sitting down at the table.
Mike feels a shiver and for a few moments they’re all silent, but then he takes Olivia’s hand and looks at her closed face. He still feels strangely buoyant. He squeezes gently. ‘My darling wife … I would say you look a bit tired, but something tells me that wouldn’t be a good thing to say.’
Olivia smiles, seeming to relent, just a little.
‘However, since I’m home early, instead of going for a run, I can be your personal slave for the rest of the day. Feet up, cup of tea, dinner to follow. Your wish will be my command. What do you say?’
‘And don’t forget the snogging!’ Hannah adds helpfully before bursting into giggles.
‘My mother always called it stew. Very working class, I expect. You’re looking old, Charles,’ Helen says over the beef and kidney casserole in their Edwardian Cheshire home. ‘Or is it my eyes? Turning fifty didn’t bother me a jot, but I had twenty-twenty vision until then,’ she adds, pouring Charlie another glass of claret. She’s pulled the bottle out of the cellar so she knows it’s a good year. She feels that perhaps he will take her news better if he’s drunk a glass or two of the mellow, as he describes it.
‘I suppose five years younger classes me as your toy boy, but sadly I’ve always looked old,’ Charlie replies easily, wiping his plate with a crust of white bread. ‘Perhaps you never noticed. Did you think you’d married a matinee star?’
Helen smiles. Neither has any delusions about their appearances and they often banter easily on the subject, ruminating at length about Rupert’s unexpected good looks. ‘He must have skipped a generation or two,’ Charlie invariably comments. ‘Or perhaps he’s the butcher’s son. He was a good-looking fella before he fell off the roof. Poor old chap, better not to survive than get old really. Like Rod Hull.’
‘Oh yes, the chap from the Marathon Man. I like him.’
‘Ah, film stars. Laurence Olivier? The mad Nazi dentist?’
‘No. The Graduate. Little fellow with a nose, but something about him. One of those method actors.’
‘Robert De Niro?’
‘Charles, you are silly at times. What would I do with Robert De Niro?’
‘You have your talents …’
‘Which I save just for you! Birthdays and Christmas.’
They both laugh. ‘Wouldn’t mind another spoonful of the stew if you’d do the honours. Does Barbara still make these casseroles in that plug-in device?’
‘I think she does. But don’t ask me how it all works. I just eat what she leaves. We must never lose her, Charles. Clean house, dinner, home-made bread. As if by magic.’
‘Agreed. But she must be eighty, at least. Now she is old!’
Helen studies Charles’s face as he wipes his chin with the napkin Barbara has laundered and laid. ‘No, you’re right. Old was the wrong word. Tired or drawn would be a more accurate description. More so than usual. Are you feeling all right?’
‘I’m fine. In fact I’m delighted to be tired and drawn rather than old. It makes me feel like a boy!’
Charlie tucks into his second helping of Barbara’s casserole, hoping Helen will change the subject. At times during their marriage, he’s tried to deflect her long-winded inquisitions, but generally to no avail. Her tendency to see only the black and white in life means she can detect a lie or indeed a deflection a mile off. It’s better to keep a low profile and eat up. He likes eating dinner with Helen, it’s a wonderful combination of the three things he loves best in the world: food, wine and his wife.
A bloody diabetic, he ruminates inwardly as he savours the warmth of the wine on his throat. How preposterous. These women doctors don’t know a thing.
Charlie’s usual doctor, Simpson, is away, or so he was told by the fearsome receptionist when he visited the surgery that afternoon for his test results. One of the junior associates sat looking a little too comfortable in Simpson’s seat, gazing at a computer screen. She looked so very young, like barbers and builders and general office staff.
He furtively glances again at Helen across the worn mahogany table. In either law or medicine, mistakes are easy to make when looking at other people’s cases, computer or not. There’s no point making a fuss until he speaks to Simpson. He’ll worry about it then if he has to. For now his stomach is speaking. A touch of something sweet, it says, and then perhaps a small glass of golden dessert wine to finish.
‘Now, what about pud?’ he asks, lifting his spoon.
‘I’m going to New York City in January, Charles,’ Helen says bluntly. ‘To New York University. I’ve been selected by Ted Edwards to teach and do some research on a secondment and I’m thrilled.’
‘That’s nice. Shall we move on to—’
‘I’ll be there for a year, Charles,’ Helen interrupts firmly.
He puts down his spoon. ‘Good God, Helen,’ he replies. ‘That’s preposterous.’ Charles Proctor doesn’t need to be told anything twice.
The girls are in bed, Mike and Olivia are alone in the bay-windowed lounge and they have no more excuses. Mike takes a deep breath and looks at his wife on the sofa opposite. ‘I’m sorry, Olivia. I realise I’ve …’ he nearly uses the football analogy again, but he doesn’t think Olivia will be amused. ‘Well, I’ve had my mind on other things, I suppose. I didn’t realise it until now. But I can see that I’ve neglected you and the girls and I’m sorry. I’ll stop.’
Olivia examines her neatly trimmed nails. She speaks quietly and he has to lean towards her to hear. ‘I need to know why, Mike. I don’t want to know, but I need to know.’ She’s silent for a moment, and then she lifts her head to look him in the eye. She looks unbearably sad, her face pale, tears about to spill from her eyes. ‘Please be honest with me.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Are you having or have you had an affair?’
Mike almost flinches. It’s the last thing he expects to hear. ‘What the … no! Where on earth have you got that idea from?’ he says, almost laughing with relief at the absurdity of her suggestion.
‘Be honest, Mike.’
‘I am! Absolutely.’
Mike prays the sincerity is showing on his face, and is rewarded when the relief almost visibly flows from Olivia’s body. Limp and shaking, she bows her head, burying it in her hands.
For a moment he sits back in the armchair and watches, a surge of panic stopping him from reaching out to her. She’s been so tense and unhappy, now she’s so relieved at his reply. They live together, they sleep in the same bed. How has he missed all of this?
Olivia lifts her head, but still averts her eyes. ‘I thought you’d stopped loving me,’ she says quietly, the tears rolling down her ashen face. ‘You seemed so disinterested, so remote. Then I thought of how Judith has thrown herself at you for all these years and it all made sense.’
‘Jude’s just friendly,’ he replies with surprise. ‘You know that. She’s friendly with everyone, you included.’ He feels mildly irked at the idea; it seems so silly. ‘Besides, she’s having a baby in two months.’
He sees Olivia’s face harden and the penny drops. ‘You didn’t think …?’ He can feel the heat rise, angry now, offended and alarmed that Olivia can even imagine such a thing.
‘A devoted secretary who’s always fancied you, pregnant with a man she won’t name, you away with the fairies, what was I supposed to think?’ Olivia’s words cut through him like knives.
Much later, after Mike has been on a long run in the dark and drizzle, the black dog running alongside him on the wet pavements of Chorlton, the irritation he feels at Olivia’s logic starts to recede. The idea of anyone he knows, let alone he or Olivia, having an affair is ridiculous. He knows some men occasionally have a quick shag if the opportunity presents itself, to satisfy a small desire, like the need to scratch an itch, but not the planning, the lies, the awful betrayal of a full-blown relationship. But his head has now cleared, and in fairness to Olivia, he understands he has been distant, something he didn’t fully realise until a twelve-year-old told him straight.
Life still isn’t all right, but there’s some sense of relief that Olivia’s strange behaviour has been explained. And when she steps naked into the shower beside him, his anger is replaced by an urgent desire to have her, to mark her, to show her he loves her, there in the shower, rough and fast, the water expunging her tears.
‘I love you, Olivia,’ he roars as he climaxes. ‘I love you and only you. Do you hear me?’
Olivia nods and smiles, but as he wraps her in a towel and holds her in his arms, he thinks she looks sad.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_5b41d02a-47bf-5ed0-9aca-5516052ccbce)
Sami leans back in his chair and puts his feet on the office desk. For a moment he studies the shine on his shoes. They cost him a hundred and fifty quid, but they’re worth every penny. ‘Because quality really does count,’ he mutters before going back to reading Luxury Auto magazine. He thumbs through the glossy pages, but he isn’t really looking at it as he usually does, pawing over each photograph and article before comparing performance. He’s too distracted for that, his mind swamped with thoughts of his afternoon meeting out of the office.
His eye catches the heading ‘Size Has Clout’ and he smiles for a moment before a mild but nagging anxiety sets in. ‘Oh, piss off,’ he says out loud. It’s an unwelcome emotion, one which hasn’t really bothered him since the day he discovered he was attractive. An overheard conversation between his eldest sister and her new friend from university when he was fourteen. ‘Ramona, your little brother. His face – he’s stunning!’ he’d heard. He’d rushed to the bathroom and locked himself in, dared his eyes to the mirror expecting to see a fat boy, but had been astounded to find that the girl was right. His chubby cheeks had grown thin, his face was bony and chiselled. It was a turning point for Samuel Richards. Samuel became Sami. He stood tall and put anxiety behind him. But now it prods at him from a distance and he isn’t entirely sure what it means.
He takes his feet off the desk and leans on the table, careful not to crease his tie. ‘Why am I anxious?’ he scribbles on the writing pad with the fibre-tip pen he bought to match his watch.
Reclining again, he swings in his chair, the pen to his mouth. Perhaps it’s the huge project at Trafford and the commission he’ll lose if it doesn’t go through. Or maybe it’s Sophie, his mother and the IVF. Or even the suit he forgot to collect from the cleaners. But he knows it’s Friday, last Friday, when he should’ve been in the pub. The memory catches his breath and makes his skin tingle. It just isn’t like him to care so much.
He crumples the paper into a ball and lobs it into the waste-paper bin, expecting to score as usual. It hits the edge and lands softly on the carpet. He stands, bends to pick it up and looks at it thoughtfully in his palm before dropping it directly into the bin. Then he stoops to look at himself in the mirror hung next to his surveying qualification certificates. Replacing one of the certificates, it’s really too low for Sami’s height. Everyone in the office laughs at this token of vanity, but he doesn’t care. ‘Have to keep up the standards,’ he always says to anyone who comments. ‘You should try it.’ But the reality is that standards don’t come into it, he’s one handsome bastard and the mirror is there for him to strut and to preen, to confirm what he already knows. But today his reflection doesn’t look quite right. It’s as though his slight emotional imbalance is reflected in his striking face.
‘No, really, piss off,’ he says again before collecting his jacket and keys and then checking one last time that the words ‘site meeting’ are clearly legible in his diary for anyone who might look.
David feels breathless as he studies the backlog of letters that have accumulated on his office desk. He has work to do. Proper everyday work. Searches to make, title deeds to check, leases to read, contracts to exchange. But he has been preoccupied for days. Paralysed, almost.
‘Routine commercial conveyancing isn’t rocket science, David,’ one of the other partners frequently goads. But that isn’t entirely true. Conveyancing has its challenges, it can go pear-shaped, just like everything else in the law. And if a date is missed, a search omitted? Well, he’s only human. One or two mistakes are easy to make.
His secretary has attached the letters to the front of their respective files with a yellow paper clip, in order of importance. ‘I don’t think there’s anything imminent. Well, no exchanges this week, anyway,’ she said earlier.
Yet every file he opens seems to sneer at him, to laugh and to say, ‘I could be another mistake, David. Dig beneath the surface and you’ll find me waiting for you.’
The sudden noise of the telephone makes him start. Everything makes him start. It’s all he can do not to retch.
‘Hi, David, it’s Colin. A problem with one of my files seems to have come up. Can I have a word about it? How about in ten, fifteen minutes?’
He rests his head in his arms. God knows why the other partners have put him in charge of indemnity and claims, the majority seem to be on his own files. Perhaps that’s why, he thinks wryly, they’re so used to his cock-ups, they decided he may as well have the hassle of everyone else’s as well.
‘That’s what insurance is for, David,’ Charlie says whenever David confesses to another small mistake over a glass of wine at the end of the day. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only money. We all make mistakes, even me.’
Of course Charlie has never made a mistake. At least not one David is aware of. He wishes that he could be like Charlie, intelligent and able, ploughing through the work with simple ease. Yet if he’s honest, he knows Charlie’s success comes from hard graft as well as ability and that he’s stupid and lazy in comparison. Every hole he finds himself in is his own bloody fault. Forgetting to diarise important dates, cutting corners, occasionally being less than honest. David knows it, and he despises himself for it.
But at least his initial desperate need to confess to Charlie has abated slightly and is on the back burner again. He and the Glenfiddich accessed the client accounts on the computer the other night. They found a commercial property transaction with a substantial amount of money waiting in the account, one that wouldn’t be completed for months, and then put the temporary solution into play, transferring the money from that account to the insurance account and then paying the outstanding indemnity premium with a click of a mouse. Indemnity insurance paid, claims will now be covered, immediate problem rectified.
David picks up another file, feels the battering of his heart and tries to breathe. He can’t bear to contemplate what will happen regarding claims arising before today or how he’ll repay the funds he has borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. That’s something he needs to discuss with Charlie. The trouble is that Charlie doesn’t seem to be in the mood for listening.
Antonia’s stomach rumbles for its lunch as she pulls off her green buckled wellies on the steps. Her mum called three times before nine this morning, so she escaped to the garden with her secateurs. Snip, snip, snip. She’s been savage with her pruning, savagery that usually works.
She steps back for a moment in her socks, lifting her head and taking in her home’s clean white facade. Bless David. She never asked for a house like this, but as he often says, he’d promised it from their very first date. She can still picture it clearly.
It was a Sunday. He’d arrived ten minutes early in a low sports car. She couldn’t have told you the make, but it was small, shiny and sleek, and rather than soundless as she expected, it was loud, booming with noise, much like the man who drove it.
‘Hope you like poussin,’ he’d said at the traffic lights. Then after a moment, putting his hand on hers, ‘Only chicken. We’re having a picnic. The hamper’s in the boot. Is that OK?’
She’d nodded, feeling foolish. She hadn’t dressed for a picnic. Not knowing what to expect, she’d worn a pale pink shift dress and high heels.
David had driven towards Derbyshire, chatting all the way, then turned off the main road at some gates, parking up, jumping out to open her door and holding out his hand.
‘Welcome to Lyme Hall!’ He’d deliberately said it as though it was his and she’d laughed, pleased he was so easy to be with despite her faux pas with the heels.
Spreading out a blanket on a manicured lawn at the front of the house, David had opened the basket. Not just tiny chickens, but glossy pork pies, Scotch eggs, stuffed peppers and champagne.
‘Please take a seat,’ he’d said, gesturing to the ground. For a moment she’d frozen. The shoes were sharp-heeled, the dress fitted. Then, thinking what Sophie would do, she’d slightly hitched up her dress and slipped off her shoes. ‘This is lovely,’ she’d said.
‘And so are you,’ he’d replied.
Much later, topping up her wine, he’d grinned at her. ‘I’ve done nothing but talk. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about you.’
The mild panic was there as always, but he hadn’t told her anything really. He was a solicitor, he lived somewhere in Cheshire, he played football on a Sunday, but nothing personal, somehow. She found she liked it; she liked that he talked incessantly, but didn’t say anything profound.
‘Well …’ she’d begun, but as though sensing her hesitation, he’d put up his hand.
‘No, don’t tell me anything. You’re perfect just as you are.’
But after all the arguments with her last boyfriend, she hadn’t wanted to appear odd, wanted to get it out of the way. ‘I run a hair salon, share a flat with two friends. My dad died way back, but I still have my mum. She’s a bit fragile so she’s in a care home.’ She’d smiled, embarrassed. ‘No brothers or sisters, so there’s pretty much just me.’
David had gazed at her, but after a few moments the intensity in his eyes was replaced with a smile. ‘Me too. Parents died long ago. See? I knew you were perfect.’ He’d leaned back and stretched out his legs. ‘Told you last night you were the woman I’d marry.’ Turning to the grand facade of Lyme Hall, he’d nodded. ‘Did I mention I’m going to buy you one of these?’
