A Perfect Home (32 page)

He moved back slightly and for a second Claire thought he was going to hit her, but instead he put his head in his hands and started to cry – huge sobs that shook his whole body.

‘Just tell me why.' He looked up at her, his voice thick with tears. ‘How could you do this to me? After everything we've been through, years of hard work on this house, losing Jack – you weren't the only one who grieved over him. You weren't the only one who felt pain.'

Claire knew she should do something, comfort him, put her arms around him, but she was unable to move.

‘I didn't have an affair.'

‘No? Then why was he sending you texts like that?'

‘I only saw him a few times. I haven't had anything to do with him for months.' She kept looking at the floor; the uneven lines and cracks of the slate were like mountain ranges against a stormy sky. ‘I didn't sleep with him.'

William suddenly sat back down, his head falling forward onto to his knees. It was the position of a small, frightened child. His voice shook. ‘Do you want to leave me?'

‘I don't know.'

She saw his shoulders shake with another huge sob.

‘Do you love me?' he asked quietly.

Claire moved towards him and put her arms around him gently, rocking him as though he were one of the children. She kissed his hair and with one hand she lifted his head from his knees and kissed his wet face. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘Don't do this to me.' His eyes pleaded with her. ‘I can't think,' said Claire, tears beginning to fall from her own eyes. ‘I can't think what I want.'

‘I phoned him,' William said, still looking at her. ‘I phoned him up when I saw the messages.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I don't want to tell you what I said.'

‘OK.' At that moment, she didn't want to know. ‘I can't believe you could do this,' he said, after they had been silent for a while. ‘I thought I could trust you. I thought you were happy. Happy with all this.' His hand gestured around the room. ‘I thought I'd made you the home you wanted. It has all been for you, Claire.'

‘You've felt so detached for so long,' she said, sitting down beside him, her hand still touching his bent head. ‘As soon as you come home from work there's always something that you're doing at home, on the house, making plans for the next thing you want to do. Last summer it was all about the summer house. Now you're busy making plans for the extension over the kitchen. It never stops. I only wanted us to be together, to be a family together. I don't care about new guest rooms or summer houses. I just want a house to live in, not some eternal project. I thought you didn't really care about me any more.'

William shook his head. ‘You know how busy it is at work at the moment,' he said. ‘That's why I have to work so late. I thought you understood that.'

‘You're not listening,' Claire sighed. ‘I'm not talking about your job. I'm talking about when you're here, when you're at home. You're obsessed with this house.'

A movement above them caught Claire's eye. Oliver and Emily stood at the top of the stairs looking down at their parents on the hall floor.

‘What's the matter?' asked Oliver.

‘What's wrong with Dad?' Emily sounded frightened.

‘He's fine,' said Claire, getting up. ‘Don't worry, everything's fine.'

She came up the stairs and gave them each a hug.

‘Back into your beds now.'

Looking down, she saw that William still sat crouched on the floor, his head on his knees, oblivious to Emily and Oliver.

‘Come on,' she said to the children. ‘Don't wake up Ben.'

She got them back into bed. By the time she got back downstairs, William had disappeared from the hallway.

Claire went into the kitchen. He was sitting in the dark at the table, the whisky bottle and a full glass beside him. When she turned on the light, she could see the bottle was three-quarters empty; he must have drunk a lot of it before she came home. William gulped the whisky down in one go.

‘Does that help?'

‘Yes,' he said, and got up and retched into the sink. Claire turned on the kettle. William was sitting down again, sobbing into his hands.

‘I think you need to go to bed now,' she said. ‘We can talk in the morning. Everything will seem clearer in the morning.' She doubted this was true.

She helped him get up. He stumbled against the Aga and she steadied him and guided him, still sobbing, towards the stairs. He was too drunk to manage them, so she led him into the living room to lie down on the sofa.

‘Just leave me alone,' he mumbled thickly as she sat down beside him. ‘I don't want to look at you. I don't want to be with you. I hate you.' Claire winced and left him on his own.

She made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table with it trying to think. She couldn't believe that this had happened; could hardly bear to remember the texts William must have read. She knew how stupid she had been not to delete them, but she also knew why she hadn't.

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,' she said out loud. She had tried so hard not to look at her phone all evening that she'd never thought to check that she actually had it with her. ‘Stupid,' she said out loud again; so stupid for making this whole mess in the first place.

She wondered what William had said to Stefan on the phone. Pressing her aching eyes with her fingers, she thought about Stefan. What would he be thinking now?

William was asleep when Claire went back into the living room. He lay along the length of the sofa, a loose arm hanging down to the floor. In the fireplace the flames cast shifting shadows onto his open-mouthed, unconscious face. Claire picked up a wool throw from an armchair and put it over him. For a while she stood looking down at him, watching his chest move slowly up and down with each breath he took. She was numb and unable to move, unable to think what to do next. The grandfather clock in the hall struck three, the last chime echoing in Claire's ears as the house became silent once more.

Suddenly she knew that she must see Stefan as soon as possible, talk to him and ask him how he really felt. What did he want to do? She wished she knew what his text had said; it must have been something to make William suspicious enough to check back through her other texts.

Still looking at her sleeping husband, she quickly formed a plan in her head. She would drive to London. She could be there by dawn. But what about the children? William would be in no fit state to look after them when he woke up. Claire phoned Sally to see if she could come and take the children home with her in the morning. Her friend didn't answer; no doubt busy entertaining Josh. She would leave a note through her door and ask her to come round as soon as she woke up. In the kitchen she quickly wrote the note.

As she folded it in half she glanced at the
Idyllic Homes
magazine on the table beside her. Stefan's photograph of their decorated fireplace seemed to shine out at her from the cover. The scene looked fake and contrived.
Not such an idyllic home now
, she thought.

She crept upstairs and checked the children one by one. She longed to bend down to stroke their sleeping faces, but dared not risk waking them. She wondered what she was doing. Was she really going to tear their lives apart?

Glancing at William still sleeping heavily beside the dying embers of the fire, Claire quietly left the house.

Chapter Twenty-eight

‘
The family gather around the glowing fire to exchange presents and wish each other a Happy Christmas.'

Ice sparkled in the car's headlights as Claire drove carefully down the steep hill to Sally's house. It was in darkness as she slipped the note through the brass letterbox.

The larger roads had been gritted the night before and Claire drove faster as she passed the town and headed for the motorway. All she could think about was getting to Stefan, seeing him again. She was nervous. Her heart thumping in her chest, she felt sick with anticipation, her stomach tight beneath her seatbelt. She took a deep breath, trying to calm down and control her nerves.

Suddenly she wondered if she was over the alcohol limit for driving; it was only a few hours since she had left the restaurant . Claire slowed down; maybe she should stop. A sign to the first service station on the motorway loomed up in front of her. Coffee. She needed strong coffee, food. And cigarettes.

Dawn started to spread towards her as she began to drive again. By the time she approached the edge of London it was nearly light. A grey sky gradually turned blue.

The traffic increased as Claire passed endless miles of low industrial units and out-of-town shops. Gradually Lego-like estates of houses appeared, then pebble-dashed terraces and tall, dreary tower blocks, giving way to the glass towers of city offices and hotels. Claire had remembered Stefan's address by heart after she had sent him the apron for his sister; like a lovesick teenager she had even looked it up on a map. When she hit the South Circular she headed north, eventually turning into a high street lined with stalls setting up for a Saturday morning market.

Everything looked bright and busy in the early morning sun – primary colours, bold patterns, graffiti, music blaring and people everywhere. It was so different from the soft muted tones and quiet sounds of Claire's country life. Once she had been part of all this colour and pattern and noise. Now it seemed so strange and unfamiliar to her.

She knew she was getting close. She turned off the main street into a square of brown-bricked Victorian houses, pulled over, and parked. This was near enough for her to collect her nerves and work out exactly where she was going. Turning on her satnav she found it was only a few streets away.

Back in the car she wished she still had her mobile phone and could call Sally to make sure that the children were all right. She glanced around for a phone box. Nothing. She would phone from Stefan's.

Claire drove off again, slowly turning down a succession of roads until she found Stefan's street. It was quiet. A hotchpotch of Victorian houses, a mixture of terraced and detached, stood on pavements lined with pollarded lime trees. It seemed too staid and solid for Stefan – too dull. Just as she was about to check the street name in the A-Z she saw the block of Art Deco flats, startlingly white against the blue winter sky. It stood apart from the other buildings, a strip of smooth green lawn in front. Huge metal-framed windows curved elegantly around each side of the building with long balconies climbing up above each other to the fifth floor. She knew this was it even before she saw the large silver number on a set of double doors and the beautiful convertible parked just up the road.

Claire found a gap between two cars directly opposite the building and managed to squeeze the cumbersome people carrier into it. She knew Stefan lived on the ground floor, he had told her that. The ground floor window on the left looked dark and lifeless behind the sweep of shining glass. The window on the right was shrouded in heavy curtains, still drawn. Claire looked at her watch. Eight o'clock. Still early on a Saturday morning if you didn't have children to wake you up.

The double doors swung open and a man wearing Lycra and mirrored sunglasses came out pulling a bike alongside him. As he bumped it down the short flight of steps, he reminded Claire of an ant dragging a heavy object, concentrating hard on its challenging task. Once on the road the man cycled away and everything was quiet and still again. Claire took a deep breath. This was it; she couldn't sit here all day. She reached for the door handle of the car and stopped. She didn't even know if Stefan would be there; he could have sent his text from anywhere. For all she knew he could be away working, photographing seafront homes in California or ice houses in Greenland. She hadn't even thought about what she was going to say to him. Nothing she could think of sounded right. All she wanted to do was to feel his arms around her once more, touch him and be safe in his embrace again. He would know what to do. She felt sure he would.

She opened the car door and started to get out. Something made her glance across at the right-hand window. A movement – at first just slight. The curtains swayed then separated to leave a gap of a few feet. Claire hesitated and got back in the car. A figure appeared in the window. It was a woman, tall and thin, with long curls of tangled dark hair falling over her shoulders. She was wearing a large white T-shirt much too big for her, pale legs bare below it. She stood with her slender arms wrapped around herself as if she was cold. Claire realised that this couldn't be Stefan's flat. His must be the empty-looking flat on the other side of the front door, or maybe there were more flats at the back.

She watched the figure for a few seconds. The woman was very still. She looked deep in thought. Another figure moved towards her from the depths of the room. A man. He gently touched her shoulder and she turned into his opened arms. He hugged her, stroked her long hair. He was tall and dark too. He glanced up briefly before taking the woman's face in his hands and tenderly kissing her cheek.

Claire felt a stab of pain go through her as she realised that the man was Stefan. He was with another woman – embracing another woman – someone he was clearly intimate with. Someone he must have spent the night with. Claire looked away sick with hurt and confusion. Why had he sent the card? What had his text actually said? When Claire looked back, the figures at the window were gone; only an empty gap between the curtains was left where they had stood.

Claire desperately hoped she had been wrong. Maybe she had imagined it? Could she be in the middle of a dream? In a minute she would wake up, in bed, William asleep beside her. Everything would return to normal. Maybe there had been no magazine, no photographer, no other man and she could go back to being the obedient wife and mother that she had been before. The good wife and mother who didn't leave her children in the middle of the night and didn't dream of being in the arms of another man; who didn't smoke and send adulterous texts. The good wife who didn't let herself get into situations where she felt her life was falling apart. But Claire knew it wasn't a dream. Stefan did exist and it had been him with a woman at the window.