After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (19 page)

‘Sugar. That’s Katya.’ I pulled away from Mark.

‘Leave it. Let Sean deal. He’s here somewhere. She’s absolutely shit-faced. When she was dancing with me, I practically had to hold her up.’

‘I can’t let her make a show of herself like that.’ I felt like an older, wiser sister entrusted with saving her younger, outrageous sibling from herself.

I ran over to her. Sean had her by the wrist while she thrashed about, shouting at Melanie, her hair sticking to her face, which was wet with tears.

‘Katya. Katya! Come with me, come on, we’re going to get you some coffee.’

‘She’s after my husband. She was all over him, pressing herself up against him.’

Sean tried to lead her away but she kept pointing her finger at Melanie.

Adopting her no-nonsense headteacher voice, Melanie stepped towards her. ‘Katya, listen to me. Sean was just walking past when
Love Is All Around
came on. It was my wedding song but I couldn’t see my husband, and I do love it, so I invited Sean to dance with me. There was nothing in it. I mean, we’re not teenagers running off with each other’s boyfriends, are we?’

Katya broke free of Sean and shoved Melanie backwards. As Melanie stumbled, her heel caught in the matting and she ended up in a heap on the floor.

‘Ow, ow, my ankle! I think I’ve broken it.’

A little posse of people gathered around her, giving conflicting instructions: ‘See if you can turn it’; ‘Keep it still’; ‘Wiggle your toes.’ Briefly, I wondered whether we were insured for fisticuffs among the punters.

I grabbed Katya. ‘Come on, out now. Sean, go to the caterers and get some ice in a tea towel for Melanie.’

The big man estate agent, the bloke who clapped other men on the shoulder and drew women to him like wasps to a mango just stood there.

‘Sean!’

His eyes were glazed, as though he was somewhere else. Like a slow-moving film, an image of him trying to win a huge toy rabbit at the Great Yarmouth funfair sprung to mind. Checked shirt, bulging rugby muscles, white teeth in a huge smile. A surge of pride in me. I’d ignored the other girls, their curious glances about what sort of insipid girl would lay claim to a superstar like him. I mourned who we were.

More softly, I said, ‘Sean, fetch some ice. Please.’

He blinked and clicked into action. Mark appeared at the other side of Katya. She wrestled with us but we held firm. Mark shook his head and nearly made me laugh.

That good, reliable man.

T
he later I
went to bed, the earlier I woke. Mark was curled on his side. I studied him. Really looked at him. His eyelashes were just like Izzy’s, long and dark, right down to the tips. We’d shared out the noses in our family. Izzy had my thin, slightly hooky nose, while Jamie had Mark’s neat, snubby one. In his features, I could see the patchwork of my children. Little earlobes like Izzy. Dimpled chin like Jamie. A dear, familiar face with a thousand expressions and emotions replicated in the kids. I wanted to wake him up and shout, ‘You deserve better! You don’t know what I’ve done!’

But as I did most mornings, I gathered up the bad feelings, brushing them into a central heap like dirt on a marble floor, then trapped them tight, pushing them into a corner of my stomach, where they would sit all day, a dull weight of disgust.

I went downstairs to find Mabel in the last few minutes of chewing through Izzy’s new pumps. ‘Naughty dog!’

She snatched the shoe up and started dancing around the table, flinging it about as though it was a great game, if only I could learn the rules.

To that and many other things.

The shoe was unsalvageable and I didn’t have the energy to go through my ‘Mabel, here’s some sausage’ routine. It was as though I’d been given a well of coping, managing and admonishing and now, at the grand age of forty-three, I’d exhausted my reserves. I’d have to manage for the next forty years on ‘whatever’.

I made a cup of tea and thought about Katya. Poor thing. I bet she was feeling a little shamefaced this morning. I imagined Sean wouldn’t be in the best shape either. He’d picked a handful there. I wondered what had made her like that. Maybe he’d had an affair. My little army of judgments leapt to accuse then slumped back down again.

Infidelity changed so many things.

I texted Katya:
Mabel up for a walk if you need some fresh air.

She arrived within twenty minutes with a bottle of Vittel, sunglasses and a bag of doughnuts. ‘Thank you for still speaking to me.’

‘Who am I to judge? We all make mistakes. Do you know if Melanie’s okay?’

Katya grimaced. ‘She went off to A&E. Sean said she couldn’t put pressure on her ankle. It’s not great, is it?’

I pulled a face. ‘Let’s get out on the hill.’

Unlike our normal walks when Katya steamed along, determined not to miss the chance to burn off her carrot stick calories, we ambled, watching Mabel chase after squirrels and bark up trees. ‘Do you think anyone will speak to me at school?’

‘To be honest, I don’t think Melanie is that popular. Anyway, it’s nearly Christmas so people are far too busy to worry about a drunken scrap at the hog roast.’

We walked in silence. Katya sipped from her water. I bellowed at Mabel, who was darting in and out of the cows. The last thing I needed this morning was a herd of Belted Galloways thundering after me. Mabel reached a compromise by eating the cowpats, rather than goading the providers.

‘What did Sean say?’

‘I haven’t seen him. I didn’t make it upstairs last night. Fell asleep on the sofa. Usually he wakes me up but I guess he’d had enough of me.’

‘Did Melanie do something to make you jealous?’

Katya laughed, a sore, mirthless sound. ‘Any woman who gets near him makes me jealous. Can I be honest?’

I tried to lighten the moment. ‘Please don’t tell me anything about your sex life.’

Katya stared into the distance. ‘If you weren’t such a good friend, I’d have a real problem with you. I know you’ve only met him a few times but Sean seems to tell you things that he’s never mentioned to me.’

I concentrated on whistling Mabel, who for the first time in her life, came immediately, thus depriving me of an excuse to ignore Katya’s statement.

‘I’m sure he doesn’t. He’s probably told Mark, who’s passed it onto me. I remember all sorts of rubbish that everyone else doesn’t bother to retain in the first place.’

Katya looked wretched. ‘Over the years, Sean’s stopped trusting me with anything because he’s afraid I might use it against him at a later date. He tells you things because he knows you don’t gossip. And you’re so happily married, I bet he hopes it will rub off.’ She sighed. ‘I’d love the simplicity of your life.’

A little knot of anger contracted in my stomach. Me and my impeccable life. The stalwart of the fundraising committee. The woman who makes a living out of peddling a dream that can’t possibly be sustained. The DIY king of a husband. I’d even managed to have one boy and one girl. Except that my life was the family equivalent of Venice: the foundations were rotting and the water levels were rising. Whether I could shore it up in time was anyone’s guess.

I flung the ball for Mabel. She ignored it and ran in the opposite direction. My main exercise these days was fetching the ball myself.

‘Katya. You’ve got to stop thinking that everyone, especially me, is so perfect. One, I hardly ever see Sean, so there’s no opportunity for him to tell me anything. And two, no marriage is how it appears to everyone else. People make mistakes in their relationships all the time, it’s just that most of the time, it’s not as obvious as a punch-up at the hog roast.’

I was hoping to make her laugh, but she grabbed my wrist, all hoarse-voiced and madwoman-in-the-corridor eyes. ‘Can I tell you something? That you won’t judge me for?’

I wanted to back away like Mabel did when I tried to make her eat a piece of cucumber. I didn’t want to hear anything that I’d have to keep a secret. I already needed heavy-duty concrete to keep the lid on my own misdemeanours. ‘I don’t judge anyone, Katya.’

‘Years ago, just after Eleanor was born, I had an affair.’

‘You had an affair?’ I almost heard my preconceptions scraping across the floor of my brain to rearrange themselves and accept that it was Katya, not Sean, who’d been unfaithful. And then a flood of disdain, that she would do that. Maybe I did judge people.

Until I remembered.

My brain still strained to find a way to make me less culpable than all the other dishonest people who decided that it was their right to have some fun regardless of the cost to the people who loved them.

‘I did. I felt so unattractive and frumpy. And then this friend of ours started making a play for me, and Sean was out working all hours and it just sort of happened.’

‘Does Sean know?’

Katya looked away and nodded. ‘It hasn’t exactly improved our marriage. Because he’s so attractive, I feel I should be grateful that he even looked at me in the first place. I could just about cope before this happened but now I spend my whole life expecting him to get his own back on me.’

‘Have you had any counselling?’

‘We probably needed it. Sean refused point blank. Said he wasn’t dragging up the past and would just concentrate on the future.’

I stayed silent. Selfishly relieved that Sean hadn’t gone delving into the past.

Katya laughed, the sort of dry, dull sound I might make if someone told a sexist joke but I didn’t want to fall out with them. ‘I bet this is so alien to you. I envy you so much, having a clean slate. It’s just such a simple way to live – marrying one person, having children with them, staying faithful. No need for any pretence. I guess some people are destined to have straightforward lives. I don’t think I was one of them.’

I struggled to find a response. Katya sounding jealous of my life based on erroneous assumptions made me want to lie on the grass and thrash about screaming. I was not someone to admire. Not someone with whom to compare herself and pump up the pain, inflating her own failings under the glory of my glittering excellence.

She scuffed along beside me for a moment, then burst out with, ‘I’m thinking of leaving Sean. Not because I’d be happier, but because he would.’

‘Don’t be silly, Katya. He loves you.’

‘How can you know that?’

Her words were straining out, as though the knotting and twisting inside of her had strangled some vital airway. I couldn’t let her throw away her life on a whim. They’d weathered the worst. She just needed to forgive herself and move on. Said the woman who’d superglued herself into 1982.

‘I know because he told me. Last night, actually.’

‘Last night? When? Why were you having that conversation with him? I thought you said you never spoke to him.’

The slumped shoulders had vanished. Her head was up. It was as though I’d pushed her into a bed of nettles and all her nerve endings were quivering as they tried to override the shock. I stopped walking and put my hand on her arm.

‘You should be pleased. How many husbands go round telling people they hardly know how much they love their wives?’

She shook me off. ‘But how did you come to have the conversation in the first place? You’re supposed to be my friend. I don’t want you talking to my husband about me behind my back.’

I ignored the stab of injustice and forced my voice into a placatory tone. As Mark would say, this wasn’t about me. ‘I wasn’t talking about you behind your back, silly. I can’t remember how the conversation came about. I think we were discussing how lucky we were to have chosen the people we married.’

I breathed out, not daring to look at her in case she saw the truth on my face.

She burst into tears, trying to speak, little bubbles of saliva gathering in the corner of her mouth. ‘I must seem pathetic to you. Please don’t go home and tell Mark how ridiculous I am. And don’t tell him about the affair. He’d be so horrified.’ She tried to smile. ‘He’s so lucky to have such a nice wife who doesn’t go round screwing his friends.’

Anger swept across my skin like a sandstorm across a desert. Saint bloody Lydia. And before I could reason, the next sentences rushed out of my mouth, as involuntary as a sneeze. ‘For god’s sake, Katya. He’s not lucky at all. If only he knew just how bloody unlucky he is. I’ve had an affair. And not years ago, like you.’

I just shot it out there, like a suicidal atoning of my guilt, travelling on a wave of rage. As soon as the words hit the Surrey air, my emotion fragmented. Fear surged through me.

Katya knew one big secret. Sean knew the other.

And Mark’s happiness depended on them finding the strength to keep that knowledge to themselves. I would have done anything to suck back in those words, bury them under the sandbags of shame where they belonged.

Katya’s face was the stuff of the stupid YouTube videos Jamie loved. I could quite imagine the bug-eyed image of her spreading around the world with the title: ‘Middle-class mother hears shocking news from someone she thought was a nun,’ followed by a dramatic folding up and slumping to the floor.

‘When?’

‘At the Surrey Business Stars Awards in September. An Italian guy. It was all a mistake.’ Everything in me burned. The alien feeling of confiding in her, anyone, made me want to run away and hide in the dark, somewhere soft and warm.

Mabel saved Katya from having to form words into any kind of sentence by arriving with a baby rabbit in her mouth, its eyes bulging with fright. Jesus. Never mind getting a dog to keep your blood pressure down. I needed to get rid of mine to increase my chances of not having a heart attack.

‘Mabel! Off! Off!’ She cavorted away, with the poor bunny’s back leg scrabbling helplessly in the air. I fumbled for the chicken in my bum bag.

‘Mabel, look, here, chicky, chicky-chick-chick.’

I laid a little Hansel and Gretel trail towards her, but she kept dancing away. I couldn’t blame her really, since a lifetime of pent-up anger was channelled into yelling her name.

Katya was screaming, ‘Oh my god, oh my god!’ Not very helpful, but a useful outlet for her shock at the news that I was a right old slapper. I bellowed at Mabel, the rage in my voice so unfamiliar that I almost turned round to see who was shouting. As a woman walking a golden retriever appeared from the tree line, I registered a middle-class moment of embarrassment. Fortunately, Mabel stopped to sniff the other dog’s backside. I found my ‘mother who plays Scrabble with her children’ voice. ‘Could you grab her for me, please? I’m having a bit of bunny crisis.’

Life crisis, actually.

Once the woman got hold of Mabel, the tricky task of prising her jaws open began. I kept having visions of the rabbit’s eyes popping out of its head and exploding onto the grass in front of me. The more I tried to prise Mabel’s mouth open, the more the rabbit’s eyes seemed to be clinging into their sockets by the tiniest thread. I belted her rump in desperation but she didn’t even flinch, let alone release her jaws.

Eventually the other woman produced a squeaky ball, which had an instant effect. The rabbit was dumped unceremoniously on the hill, while Mabel almost made a pyramid on the golden retriever’s back in her efforts to reach the ball. I picked up the rabbit, trying not to squeal myself and popped it under a blackberry bush. I didn’t even look to see if it was capable of stumbling off to die somewhere else.

I yanked Mabel away in a scene I should have videoed for Harry Hill. I gave the woman two pounds for her ball rather than waste another moment waving chicken while skidding about in cowpats. Mabel strutted towards home, producing the odd boastful squeak from the ball with an expression of satisfaction for how her morning had turned out. I, on the other hand, staggered forwards, forcing my way through the big cloud of horror that enveloped Katya and me. I needed to be the one to speak but it was as though someone had turned me upside down like a money box and shaken all the words out of me.

Eventually, Katya stopped. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone.’

‘I shouldn’t have put that burden on you. I just couldn’t bear you thinking that I was so perfect. It was a mistake. Please don’t tell anyone. Mark doesn’t know. No one knows. It only happened once.’

Now I was lying again. Only recently I had taken Jamie to task when he lied about going on Snapchat. I couldn’t see how the taking of any photo, even if it disappeared after a few seconds, was going to lead to a good outcome. My last words to him were, ‘No one likes a liar or a cheat. Don’t be that person.’

We reached the car in silence. Mabel did her usual standing there like a lump when the only barrier to her jumping in the boot was her own contrariness. I heaved her in. I’d toed the line for thirty years, filtering out information on a need-to-know basis like sand through an egg timer. For one crazy moment, I had the urge to turn to Katya, pat her knee and say, ‘And that’s just the beginning. I’m gonna tell you a story. It started with your husband, three decades ago….’