After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (24 page)

I
replayed
my shoe shop diatribe as I drove home, closing my eyes in a cringe. My dad would be so upset that I’d left my mother stranded.

‘In this family, we look out for each other.’

I’d always wanted to argue that my mother never seemed to be looking out for me, though she had an eagle eye on what the neighbours thought. Then I’d remind myself what Dad had suffered on my behalf and vow never to bring it up.

My stomach fizzed with acidity, which brought to mind my Gaviscon days when I was pregnant with Izzy. My naïvety back then was astounding. I’d actually allowed myself several moments of smug relief that the girl ‘who’d done bad’ had managed to end up married with two children. The perfect family.

As I parked on the drive, I released my grip on the steering wheel. I realised I’d been braced for an empty space where Mark’s car had been. What if he just hadn’t got round to leaving yet? I turned the key in the door and pushed it, feeling resistance on the other side. My face crumpled, great whirls of desperation surging through me. Were they suitcases blocking the door? My god, Mark really was going. But the resistance suddenly gave and I fell inside to be greeted by Mabel, sniffing and wagging, yawning in a cartoon manner that suggested she’d been on a twenty-mile rabbit hunt rather than an extended sleep as a door stop.

Mark wasn’t in the kitchen but the house didn’t have that wallowy feel, the gaping emptiness of absence. I walked quietly upstairs, not sure whether I wanted him to know I was home or not. He was in the study, sitting at the desk, head bent over something. Typical Mark. Start with the practicalities like the bank statements and deal with the emotions later. I leaned against the doorjamb.

‘Any word from Jamie?’

He swivelled round in the chair. ‘No, all quiet.’ There was nothing inviting about his tone.

I squinted to see what he had in his hand.

He indicated a pile of photos: Izzy with her white-blonde hair as a toddler, Jamie with his goofy front teeth. ‘Just trying to work out where I messed up. When the moment was that you decided that your vows didn’t mean anything anymore.’

I couldn’t hold on then. I ran over and kneeled on the floor in front of him. ‘You didn’t make it go wrong. I did. Too many lies. Or too many omissions. I couldn’t keep the lid on it anymore. I couldn’t tell you. I could only tell a stranger.’

Mark flinched. ‘You could have had counselling. You didn’t need to go and shag someone else, for god’s sake. You went to Italy with him. And I was happy that you’d found him. Thought he’d take care of you and your mother. So bloody naïve.’

The anguish in his voice sliced through me like a hundred tiny paper cuts. I’d hardly ever heard Mark use bad language. It was one of the many things that made him acceptable to my mother.

He picked up some photos of him and the kids at Winkworth Arboretum a few autumns ago, before the children had blurred into teenagers. I wasn’t in any of them, always behind the camera. He pointed to Jamie. ‘Do you remember that squirrel falling out of the tree and scaring him half to death? We were happy that day. Or were you just going through the motions, even then?’

I had been happy. Of course I had. But it had always felt like happiness with an expiry date, a smudged ‘best before’ stamp that no one could read. I looked down at Jamie’s face, flushed with cold air and excitement. What if Jamie had had sex with Eleanor? What if Katya carried out her threat to go to the police? I might be hovering on the fruitcake margins myself but Katya was as unhinged as a barn door in a hurricane.

Mark looked down at me, his eyes serious. ‘Tell me it wasn’t all a lie. That some of it was real.’

‘It was
all
real! My love for the kids, for you, it was
all
real. It’s just that in the beginning, you know, back then, my mother forbade me to breathe a word about it, and over time, I really thought I’d begun a new life; I believed that I could put that shame and upset behind me. Then Sean turned up and I was just so frightened the whole time.’

Mark shook his head. ‘You must have felt so alone. It makes me feel really horrible that you didn’t trust me.’ His voice dropped. ‘And now it’s too late.’

I grabbed his knee. ‘No. Don’t say that. I should have trusted you. I should never have done what I did. Never. But don’t let that overshadow what we still have.’

Leaps of terror were bounding through me as though my heart was free-falling into an uncertain future.

‘Don’t do anything now. Please don’t. Don’t stay for me but stay for the children, just until we get through all this Eleanor/Jamie stuff. Then you can make your mind up.’

I wanted to cling to him, stop him getting up from his chair even though he was showing no signs of moving.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

I felt something steady, the tipping and shuttling inside me easing into something horizontal. ‘Ever?’

‘That I don’t know.’

Mark didn’t meet my eye, as though he couldn’t quite believe that the wife he thought was so ordinary, had turned out to be such a bag of trouble. ‘I won’t do anything until I know Jamie’s okay.’

The contrast between Mark and Tomaso, the man I’d kidded myself I could be so open with, was so huge that I’d never be able to trust my judgment on anything ever again.

‘Thank you.’ I opened my mouth to try to find an explanation when there wasn’t one. Or at least, not one that could ever come close to justifying what I’d done to this man, this man who loved his children as much as I did. That alone was an incredibly good reason to ring fence the whole family with pitchers of boiling oil against weaselly imitations and their promises of excitement and adventure.

‘I’m so, so sorry.’

I don’t think I’d ever managed to gather such intense regret and sentiment into an apology. It was as though I’d herded my words into a test tube then distilled them over a Bunsen burner into the one sentence that defined my emotions.

Mark studied me, acknowledging he’d heard with the slightest nod.

I wanted him to forgive me. My mother’s favourite phrase, ‘No harm in wanting’ rang in my ears. But forgiveness seemed far from his agenda. The way he shrank away from me every time I leaned towards him chilled me. He’d always been the tactile one, not me. Now I craved his touch so absolutely that my skin felt as though it was lifting up and stretching towards him. My mother’s second comforting mantra hustled into my misery: ‘You reap what you sow.’

I glanced at my watch, defeated. ‘I’ll go and pick the kids up.’

Mark got to his feet. ‘I’m coming with you, just in case there’s any trouble from Katya.’

Anger-laden car silence was so much better than will-I-won’t-I-come-home-to-an-empty-house fear.

I
’d always imagined
that the unravelling of life would be a sudden storm of events, followed by quick decisions and swift, sharp ultimatums. Instead, over the next few weeks, my marriage turned into a slow puncture: a wheezing out of energy, a scraping along with less commitment to going in the right direction but not quite buggered enough to merit a full call-out of the RAC.

We still sat down to eat as a family. Mark carried on with the Groundhog Day of telling Izzy to stop picking at her vegetables and just ‘get on with it’. I continued to nag Jamie about getting to bed at a decent hour. We both pulled our weight on the homework front, Mark with Maths and Science, me with languages and Art. Jamie seemed to have settled back into school. I see-sawed between a detailed investigation about whether he was still going out with Eleanor and sticking my head into the deepest sandpit I could find. Certainly, he was still spending a lifetime with the hairdryer and gel every morning, in a cloud of deodorant that enveloped the bathroom like a spring mist.

Unlike my mother, who would have accepted ‘I’m fine’ if my leg had been hanging off as long as I didn’t bleed on the rug, I did try and keep those elusive channels of communication open. Most of the time, I felt as though I was talking to everyone through an empty cardboard tube, muffled and distorted.

Worst of all was when I’d put out my hand to touch Mark when we were in bed at night and he’d just lie there like a phone mast, not shrugging me off but not relaxing into me either.

One thing that we had agreed on very quickly, in a super-polite, ‘No, no, you speak first’ discussion was that, before Katya put her own spin on it, we had to tell the children about my own history so it didn’t reach them via Eleanor and Chinese whispers. But of course, it wasn’t as simple as me just cracking open the secrets over spaghetti bolognese. The story wound its way like ivy round Dad and Sean.

We decided to invite Dad over for the great unveiling of ‘the thing that must never be spoken of’. My mother was still waiting for an apology for my behaviour, which worked to my advantage in a way she couldn’t possibly imagine. Without the drip-feed of her criticism eroding me, I was able to think without examining my actions through my mother’s looking glass. Cracked and broken though I might have been, my reactions were just that – spontaneous responses rather than a consideration of how to act. In fact, despite everything, small suggestions of self-belief were pushing through, so much so that I toyed with the idea of inviting Sean – who, given the
entente uncordiale
in my house, was starting to look like less of an enemy and more of an ally.

Sean would have helped the children see that this person they called Mum, the person without any feelings, who was just there, roboting through life, producing food, clean clothes and homework help, was human, with an ability to make hideous mistakes and hopefully, a capacity to repair them.

But when a long list of ‘snagging issues’ in the kitchens Mark had fitted arrived by recorded delivery, purporting to be from Sean but with the hallmarks of Katya all over it, I knew better than to suggest it.

On the day, Dad came to dinner so much more like his old self, with his stinky beef sticks for Mabel in one pocket and a clutch of pound coins for the kids in the other. I got as far as explaining to the kids we had something important to tell them before Dad put out his hand and said, ‘Lydia, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell the story.’

And tell the story he did, slightly airbrushing the truth about me, while, if not darkening, certainly pulling no punches when it came to claiming responsibility for his part in the proceedings. As he spoke, I could see that putting the whole sorry tale out there for judgment was giving him strength rather than feeding his fear.

Izzy’s face was a picture – a whirlpool of emotions shifting across her features like the reflections in a fast-flowing stream. Her granddad, the jovial toffee-giver, was taking on a different dimension before her eyes. Jamie’s lips twitched with amusement when Dad cleared his throat and said, ‘I really did go a bit overboard in teaching the poor chap a lesson. I’d never hit anyone before and I don’t think I knew my own strength.’ The more the details of the past made contact with air rather than being sealed away in the dungeons of family history, the less huge and traumatic it sounded.

All of them appeared to be understanding things about me, which seemed odd, given that I wasn’t any different from the person I’d been the day before. Jamie said, ‘That’s why you’ll never get in the photo.’ He almost laughed, then decided against it. We weren’t anywhere near finding the latest photo-related debacle funny. He did pull a bit of a face when it dawned on him that Eleanor’s dad had seen me naked.

‘So you showed your bits to Sean?’

‘Well, not in the same way that people of your generation take photos of each other, no.’ I blushed. I hoped I’d made it sound arty rather than sordid. I wasn’t the sort of mother who left the bathroom door unlocked. I looked away, avoiding everyone’s eye, but especially Mark’s. A quick glance at his face told me that he wasn’t thinking about Sean, but about Tomaso.

Jamie seemed quite fascinated by the naked element of the story. ‘Does Katya know?’

I nodded, trying not to think about her little face twisted with rage. Or the threats she’d made to Jamie.

‘Can I tell Eleanor?’

‘I think that’s up to her mum and dad really.’ I detested the idea that the little madam would be all agog at my own lack of propriety – with her father. Some part of my brain was managing to store away the confirmation that Jamie and Eleanor were still speaking. ‘Has Eleanor mentioned anything about how her parents are?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Whether they’re getting on all right?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘She did say her mum was always shouting at her dad.’

‘Do you know what over?’ I still woke up in the night and top of the list of worries barking for attention was whether Jamie had slept with Eleanor and whether Katya would involve the police if he had.

Jamie wrinkled his nose, indicating that interest in other people beyond a passing curiosity in whether they were still alive or not was for losers. I couldn’t sit there one moment longer. There wasn’t one single thread of my life that didn’t have complications hanging off it like a litter of suckling puppies.

‘Right, I’m shattered. I think it’s an early night for everyone.’ I got up, mustering my last dregs of energy to shoo the kids upstairs.

I stood with my dad in the hallway. I hugged him, feeling the sharp edges of his shoulder blades through his shirt. He stood back, holding me by the arms. ‘Are you okay? I suppose this has stirred up a lot of bad memories for you.’

My eyes stung with suppressed tears. ‘There are lots of things going on, Dad. Mark and I aren’t in a good place right now.’

Panic shot through me as though I might have delivered some knowledge Dad wouldn’t be able to handle, that would send him spiralling off into that vacant world of staring into space and time-delay responses.

But he looked me straight in the eye. ‘Lydia. He’s a good man. You’re a great wife and brilliant mother. Find a way through this. Talk to each other. We should all have done more of that.’

I nodded.

‘You need to make it up with your mother. She did what she thought was best, you know. They were different times back then. Nowadays anything goes – you’ve only got to look at the telly, no one’s shocked by anything anymore.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think it’s that different, Dad.’

He raised an eyebrow but I had no appetite left for explanations.