A Minor Indiscretion (36 page)

M
y insides feel as if they've been scrubbed out with one of the white nylon bottle brushes that you can only buy from Kleenezee catalogs. Going to the toilet every ten minutes aided and abetted only by candlelight does not make for a peaceful night's sleep, I can tell you from bitter experience.

Christian is sitting at the side of me on the bed, proffering a cup of pan-boiled tea and a bowl of Sugar Puffs. He strokes the hair gently from my face and whispers, “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” I say crisply.

“You didn't sleep very well?”

“No.” I resist the urge to point out that he,
au contraire,
slept like the proverbial baby. Why is it that men never, ever have disturbed sleep no matter what the crisis? And, God knows, I tried to disturb his sleep. I kicked him, pinched him, punched him, ground my big toe into his ankle. Fruitless. All of it.

I take the Sugar Puffs, not with a good grace, and I don't even like Sugar Puffs—they're so sweet they make your face suck in and your fillings itch—but I am starving, which I take as a good sign. How can I possibly still have cancer
and
a good appetite?

“Try to get some more sleep,” he says, and kisses my forehead. “I'll see you later.”

“Later?”

“I'm going to work.”

“Work!” I abandon the Sugar Puffs and any attempt at frailty. “Work? You're supposed to be looking after me, Christian. I've just come out of hospital. I've just had a major operation. I could do with a forty-foot crane to help me get out of bed.”

“I have to go to work, Ali. I'm going to lose my pitch otherwise. Even starving artists have to play by the rules of hard commercialism these days.”

Now I'm starting to panic. He is so totally unaware of my needs. I want to scream at him:
I haven't just broken a fingernail, you know! I've got more stitches than a bloody patchwork quilt!
“How will I manage?” I sound so pathetic.

“Becs is here all day. She's doing some work from home. She'll look after you.”

“That's like leaving me to the tender loving care of Dr. Crippen!”

“You'll be fine.”

“Stop saying that! I won't be fine. I need you, Christian. If you love me, you won't walk away from me now.”

“I do love you, Ali.” I can feel a huge “but” coming on and it chills my blood.

“But?”

“But…” Christian twists the camouflage duvet in his fingers. “I'm finding this very difficult to cope with.”

“You are?”

“I know. I know. You must think I'm very selfish.”

“You can't have relationships that don't have ups and downs, Christian. It's times like these that test how strong your commitment to each other is.”

“I've never done commitment very well,” he says, and his eyes wander round the room. The room in the house that belongs to someone else. Someone else who doesn't even realize that there are strangers in his home having this conversation. “And I never realized how many commitments you had when we got involved.”

“You did.”

“I
knew
about them for sure, but I had no idea what it would be like living with them on a day-to-day basis. I like things to go along smoothly, Ali. Without hassle.”

“But that isn't real life.”

“Then maybe I'm not ready for real life.” I can see he's been
giving this a lot of thought, which scares me because Christian rarely seems to think about anything beyond the next meal. “Maybe I want to run wild with Robbie and Rebecca for a few more years. Maybe then I'll be ready to settle down.” He looks at me and hesitates before he says the next words. “Maybe then I'll want kids of my own.”

Christian's knife cuts deeper than the surgeon's. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Partly,” he admits.

I try to ignore my instincts, which are telling me to shout “I don't believe it!” very loudly. “But you can't stand children,” I point out calmly. “They were one of the obstacles.”

“And you've done a great job of convincing me otherwise.”

“So much so that now you think you'll make a great dad?” I am failing to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“I don't know if I'll make a great dad, but I would like to try.”

“Fabulous.”

“You've shown me what family life can be like, Ali. I never had that as a child. I was shunted from one boarding school to another, seeing my parents when I could be fitted in around lunch engagements and weekends at the Hunt. I never wanted to do that to another person.”

“But you can walk away from my kids?”

“I never said I wanted to walk away.”

“What else is there to do, Christian? There's nowhere for us to go from here.”

“I think we were all into this too deeply, before we had a chance to really think it through,” he says, and I have never heard him speak truer words. Christian rubs his hands over his eyes. He looks pale and tired, as if he hasn't been sleeping too well while I've been away. I push down the question that comes to my throat. “This is the wrong time to be talking about this, Ali. I have to go. Let's talk about it later.”

“By candlelight?”

“I guess so.”

“How romantic!”

“I'll try to come home early,” he promises, but the words have an empty, empty ring.

He leans over and kisses me. “I do love you, Alicia, Ali Kingston.”

And I realize that what Christian thinks is love and what I consider to be love come in entirely different packages. He stands up, slings his Nike backpack over his shoulder, blows me a kiss goodbye and walks out.

 

My Sugar Puffs have gone soggy. They are floating about on top of the milk like dead flies. My pan-boiled tea has developed pond scum. I think I've probably been looking at the wall for a long time, but I'm not sure. I hear Rebecca clonk up the stairs and she pushes the door open.

“Finished?” she says, looking at the untouched breakfast.

“I'm not hungry,” I say and try a smile.

“Are you okay?”

I laugh a little. “I've been better.”

There is a spark of barely concealed glee in her eye. “You didn't expect Christian to hang around and look after you, did you?”

I sink back into my pillow. “I had hoped he would.”

“Christian can't cope with anything that disrupts his life.”

Yes, I'm beginning to realize that, and I think he isn't the only one. I regard Rebecca coolly.

“Rebecca. Did a letter come for me a few weeks ago? Something that might have looked vaguely important?”

She puts on a defiant teenager face, and I remember that she is only a little older than Tanya. Her chin juts aggressively, challenging me. “Yes.”

“What happened to it?”

“You'll find it in pieces down the side of the sofa,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I want you out of here.” Her eyes fill with tears. “You're spoiling everything.” She sniffs petulantly, not realizing that she has probably just shot herself in the foot. Had she delivered my invitation to The Ivy, it might have solved her problem. Or would it? There's really no way of knowing now. “Everything was fine until you came along.”

“I thought it was over between you?”

Rebecca's mouth forms a tight line. “We would have got back together. It was only a matter of time. It always is. And then you came along. You think he's wonderful, but you have no idea what he's really like,” she continues, fists clenched into tight little balls. “He's still sleeping with that other little
tart,” she spits, getting into her stride. “And with anyone else who'll have him.”

Weariness engulfs me. “And with you,” I add.

Rebecca flushes, the bloodred hue of those who stand guilty as accused. “If you know,” she says, “then why do you still love him?”

I have asked myself that question a thousand times. “For the same reasons that you do,” I tell her quietly.

“Then we are both very stupid women,” she says, picking up the Sugar Puffs and the stone-cold tea. “And that's probably all we'll ever have in common.”

 

I feel an amazing sense of detachment, despite hearing more revelations than there are in the Bible in the last half hour. I am floating outside myself, allowing my thoughts to swim freely. Perhaps this is what it's like to experience drowning. Having the water fold over you, weightlessly relieving you of all pain. It is not an unpleasant feeling and, at this moment, I envy those who walk knowingly into the waiting sea, never to return.

We all start off with the best intentions in life. How easy it will be to fall in love, marry, raise children, live happily ever after. We are all convinced that we won't make the same mistakes our parents did. We are all determined to raise our children steeped in the kind of nurturing that we may or may not have had ourselves. So sure that we will do better than the generations that have struggled to do the right thing before us. But where does it all go wrong? Why do we end up pursuing our own needs at the cost of theirs, citing their resilience, their acceptance, and leave them instead flailing around on a flimsy raft of uncertain emotions?

I can see that Christian has been damaged and I too have been damaged by my own childhood, where I was loved and mollycoddled and spoiled to the nth degree. One of us is wounded by emotional neglect, the other by emotional suffocation. How finely the balance is set. My upbringing has left me with a feeling that I ought to be able to do exactly what I want. But life is never that simple, is it? And I wonder what harm I am doing, have already done, to my own three darlings in my own well-intentioned and below-par way.

I have softened toward Rebecca, despite her having just dealt a killer blow to the shreds of my fragile, fantasy romance. We
have both been drawn like moths to Christian's flame and we have both had our wings badly singed. And, whereas I am old enough to know better, she is young and still learning the hard way.

So. Let me recap for you. My toy-boy lover who everyone warned me was utterly, utterly wrong for me has proved them all right. My husband is running round trying to make Hugh Grant look like a monk. The lovely Rebecca has, herself, scuppered the best chance she had of getting me out of here. Here being the squat I am, presumably, squatting in. My sister has lost both Neil and her Swiss banker and is broody. Christian, the child-free zone, has discovered the joy of children and the fact that his biological clock might just be ticking too. I, in finding out that I'm no longer able to have children, am discovering just how important it is to me to be a mother. Have I left anything out? Probably. I bet Madonna doesn't have days like these.

I must try to relax and not think about what the future may hold, but in my book relaxation is one step away from paralyzing boredom. I pick up yesterday's
Metro
newspaper from the bedside table and flick halfheartedly through it. On page three I learn that Alan Titchmarsh has just been voted the sexiest man on British television, knocking second place rival George Clooney into a cocked hat. Now I know that the world truly has gone mad.

E
d leaned against the city-blackened railings across the street from Christian's house. He wished he were wearing a trilby and maybe a trench mac and had a cigarette that he could light moodily with a Zippo lighter. But he didn't. So instead of lurking mysteriously and glamorously, he just hung around in the hard-edged shadow of his Mitsubishi Shogun, looking slightly furtive.

Also, the sun was shining, whereas his mood was more suited to swirling fog, lamplight and sinister shifting dusk. A cooling breeze ruffled his hair, and the scent of traffic fumes was building up nicely from the crush of cars in Notting Hill Gate. He'd left the shoot early, having subjected the disreputable Ice Cool Chew-Chew Mints to the iniquities of cold water torture more times than was absolutely reasonable. He'd probably get complaints from Equity, but it had been worth it to raise his spirits, which would otherwise have stayed languishing around the doldrums somewhere.

He was struggling to come to terms with the Orla-and-Neil thing. His brother wasn't prone to flights of fancy, and Ed suspected that this might be one. Selling up your entire life on a whim and a whirlwind relationship was a pretty big step. And he worried about Orla's motives. She was too driven and too dynamic to last the distance with someone as lackadaisical as Neil. What would happen when she tired of him, as she eventually would?
But then, who was he to pour the cold water of reality on someone else's dreams? How could he tell Neil that he thought it wouldn't last? Maybe it would. He had thought the same about Ali and the starving artist, but here they were, months down the road, still at the impasse between marriage and divorce called separation, with neither of them seeming to want to make the first move toward disentangling the life they had shared together.

There didn't seem to be much in the way of activity inside Christian's house, and he wondered if Ali was alone or whether she had company. Whichever way, he'd come this far and would tough it out. For the sake of civility, he would try to avoid pushing Christian's teeth down his throat. Unless he was really provoked.

He'd been standing here for half an hour already—trying to pluck up courage to see his own wife, for heaven's sake! If he hung around any longer, he was likely to get arrested for loitering with intent, so he crossed the road, rapped firmly on the knocker and tried to convince his legs that they really would like to stop shaking.

A young woman, who looked like she'd been crying, opened the door. “Is Alicia Kingston at home?” he asked.

The girl nodded and stood to one side.

It was a nice house. Not terribly homey, but smarter than he'd expected.

“Top of the stairs,” the girl said.

“Is she alone?”

She smiled briefly. “Yes.”

Ed climbed the stairs. He should have brought flowers. Or chocolates. Or grapes. Or something. But he hadn't, and it was too late now. There were four doors at the top of the stairs and only one was ajar, so he pushed it open slightly and, knocking tentatively, stepped inside.

Ali was asleep on the bed. The duvet was pushed down by her feet and she was wearing a white cotton nightdress which was stained with drops of blood. She was lying on her side with a pillow jammed between her knees, just as she'd done when she was pregnant with all three of the children. Her face was as pale as her nightgown, and her jumble of gold curls was spread out over the pillow. Dark lashes emphasized the hollow shadows under her eyes.

The
Apocalypse Now
theme of the decoration made her seem all the more small and fragile, as if she were being held hostage here against her will. Ed's throat tightened and his eyes started to burn, hot and prickly. How had they ever come to this? What on earth was she doing lying alone and sick in some stranger's bedroom, done out with all the taste of a ten-year-old? He wanted to lie down beside her and take her in his arms and never let her go again.

There were jeans hanging up at the side of the wardrobe. Trendy, slim-hipped men's jeans. Jeans that he never would have fit into twenty years ago, let alone now that he was fast approaching middle-aged spread. A packet of Durex Extra Condoms Ribbed for Sensitivity and Sensation mocked him from the bedside table. Ed pressed his lips together grimly. He shouldn't be here. Ali hadn't wanted him to come. She'd made it abundantly clear that it was over between them. He should leave now and make his excuses later.

He looked back at his sleeping wife. Ali opened her eyes. “Hi,” she said, as if she'd been expecting him to be standing there.

Ed's voice wouldn't come. It had lodged somewhere deep down in his chest and was refusing to budge. He cleared his throat. “Hi.”

Ali patted the bed and he sat down facing her. She'd lost weight. Her arms were like sticks and her collarbone jutted out beneath her skin. She tried to push herself up on her elbows, but gave up and sank back on her pillow. “Here, let me help,” he said, and eased her upright, plumping the pillow behind her.

“How are you?” he said.

Ali bit her lip, tears filling her eyes.

“Oh God,” Ed said and wrapped his arms round her. She collapsed against him, sobbing into his chest, painful, racking sobs, and he could feel the tears soaking through his shirt. “I love you, Ali,” he murmured into her hair. Alicia cried louder.

He held her away from him and looked into her sad, tear-stained face. “Come back to me,” he said.

Ali nodded. “Yes.”

“I love you, Ali Kingston.” Ed smoothed her hair. “I always have.”

“I love you too,” she whispered and clung to his neck.

Ed held her tight, letting the relief flood through him. “Let's go home.”

Alicia wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled weakly. “I'll get my things,” she said.