Girl Unknown (10 page)

‘Tell me,’ Chris went on, his voice more incisive, ‘do you ever wonder how things might have turned out if you’d stayed together?’

The question chilled me. I found myself turning away from the possible answer.

David gave a hollow laugh. ‘We’d be like you and Susannah – an endless series of fights and reconciliations. I wouldn’t have the energy for it.’

‘But you’d have passion,’ Chris countered.

‘Yes,’ David said, in a tone of wistfulness. ‘We certainly had that.’

‘More than you have with Caroline?’

‘Yes.’ The answer was immediate. He didn’t even need
to think about it. ‘Caroline is different. She’s dependable, safe.’

I’d heard enough. Sickened by this new knowledge, I had turned away, returned to the bedroom, wishing I had never left it. I slipped away to bed, and when David came up later, I held my body still, feigning sleep. He didn’t try to touch me.

How to explain the quiet devastation caused by those words? Every time I remembered the wistfulness in his voice when he recalled his lost passion, something dark opened inside me. Like the unfurling of a shadowy new fern, I felt the opening out of doubt within me. Had it all been a mistake? Our marriage, the life we had built together, our children? Everything I valued and loved, everything I had worked so hard for, I saw now it had been built on a foundation of regret. He had given up his great love. With the cool detachment I knew him to be capable of, he had weighed up his options: passion and instability versus the safe warmth of marriage to me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t escape from the knowledge that I was not the love of his life. That title was claimed by a woman I had never met, a woman whose face I had seen once in a photograph I’d found hidden among his possessions.

I think that night in the cold darkness at the top of the stairs, overhearing the conversation, was when it started for me. The moment when things began to unravel. Unhappiness swept in like the arrival of autumn on a September day. I tried to rationalize it, telling myself David had been drunk when he’d said those words, he hadn’t really meant them. But the truth of it continued to
niggle at me. I told myself to be satisfied with what I had: a good husband, wonderful children, a comfortable home. It was more than a lot of people had – an enviable life. But the rot had set in. My husband had no passion for me. In marrying me he had chosen to settle. A pinched, mean voice inside me whispered:
If you’re not the love of his life, what makes you so sure he’s yours?
I’d never thought of myself as a woman who would have an affair. But by the time I met Aidan something had changed within me. Like a stone dislodged deep inside me, I felt the structure of my being start to crumble.

After my affair ended, David and I went through a difficult patch. Our bedroom, once a place of refuge and comfort – of love – became the arena for our hissed arguments, the to-ing and fro-ing of whispered accusations, of denial and blame. We tried to keep it from the children, remaining civil in front of them, a tight cordiality that seemed stilted and formal. Slowly, things got better. The atmosphere lightened. I still felt obliged to explain my absences, however innocent they were. I was careful of my behaviour in front of David. I found that I censored my comments when speaking of other men – friends, colleagues. I tried to find happiness again within my marriage, within my home. The stone inside me that had been dislodged slipped back into place. I was returning to myself. Normality resumed. But then Zoë had come along.

I thought about her constantly. At work, at home, in the evenings when I went out running, she was always with me, shadowing my thoughts, clouding my emotions.
I considered telling someone about her – confiding in a friend – but the only person I might have told was Susannah and she was locked inside her own conjugal disaster. Any time I spoke to her on the phone, she sounded on the brink of tears. It was disconcerting, given how commanding she normally was. She had separated from Chris, finally moving out, and under the circumstances I felt I couldn’t burden her with my own domestic turmoil. Instead, I kept it to myself.

‘What is it, Mum?’ Holly asked one evening, over dinner. David and Robbie looked up from their plates. ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are! Every time I look up, you’re staring. It’s freaking me out.’

Scanning my daughter’s face, interrogating it for traces of Zoë. Was there something in the slight flatness to her cheeks, the small nose, the wide, thin-lipped mouth revealing a straight row of small teeth?

An expression sprang up from childhood:
The cat can look at the queen
.

‘Just eat your dinner,’ I said.

While we waited for the DNA test results, it seemed as if David and I were living within an unarticulated argument. We were cordial with each other but we took a measure of care when moving through our conversations, both of us cautious not to touch on the subject. We talked about the children, about work, exchanged words about shopping, cooking, household tasks. Any thoughts
or doubts I kept to myself, and if he had any misgivings he didn’t confide them to me. Then one evening he arrived home from work and I felt a change in him straight away. When he came in from the garden, taking off his jacket as he closed the door behind him, I felt his muted anger in the way he seemed to shrink from my gaze.

‘Glass of wine?’ I asked, and he said sure, moving past me to hang his jacket from the hook on the door.

From the sitting room came a burst of laughter – Holly and two of her friends were watching the One Direction film. Beyond the window, the trees were dripping from a recent downpour, but it was warm in the kitchen, the mellow trumpet sounds of Kenny Durham coming through the speakers.

‘Cheers,’ I said, and we clinked glasses. I sat on the sofa and watched him lean back on a barstool across from me, wondering what was pulling at him. ‘You okay?’ I asked, solicitous, concerned.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you met Zoë?’ he asked quietly.

My breath caught in my throat. ‘David, I’m sorry. I should have told you. I’m not sure why I didn’t.’

He kept looking at me, a baffled expression clouding his face.

‘I suppose I thought if I could just see her, get a look at her –’

‘How did you even find her?’

‘I rang your department,’ I said, shame creeping up through me as I admitted it. It occurred to me that the methods I had employed, the way I had sneaked about, were like the actions of a suspicious wife trying to catch
her husband in the act of adultery. If David saw the irony, he didn’t say so. He was swivelling the barstool slightly from side to side, the movement channelling some of his anger.

‘Don’t you think that’s a bit creepy?’ he asked. I had the sense that he was choosing his words. For all the care he took, I could hear the accusation behind them.

‘You’re right,’ I agreed, wanting to smooth things over, even though the need to talk it through was still there, the angry pulse of it running through everything. ‘I’m sorry. It was impulsive. I didn’t think it through properly.’

He drank from his glass, turned and put it on the counter behind him. I thought he was going to let the matter drop. But then he looked back at me and said: ‘Have you any idea how freaked out she was?’

A match striking tinder. The sudden spark, his concern for the girl, seeing how it overrode my apology, my discomfort. The anger I had been holding at bay came to life inside me. ‘How freaked out
she
was?’

‘Yes. She was in a state when she came to my office today, in tears over what you had said to her—’

‘What did I say? Tell me. What did I say to upset her?’

Still quietly, he went on: ‘She said you demanded to know what she wanted from me. She felt threatened, intimidated—’

‘I didn’t intimidate her. The way you talk of her, you’d swear she was this shrinking violet.’

‘She’s just a kid.’

‘She’s old enough to know how to manipulate, David. Believe me. Clearly, she has you all figured out, turning on the waterworks so you’ll feel sorry for her.’

‘Do you even hear yourself, Caroline? Do you know how harsh you sound? How bitter?’

‘Well, what do you expect from me?’

He was making the barstool swivel harder now, his anger growing.

‘Come on, David. Tell me how you think this should work. Should I just take it on the chin? Say, “There, there, dear. Never mind about all this”, open my home and my heart to this girl – this stranger – without checking first to see if she’s real, if what she says is true?’

The chair stilled and he said: ‘You should have told me.’

‘I know. I know I should, and I’ve apologized for that.’

‘We agreed to wait, didn’t we? Until the test results came back.’

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice cool and firm. ‘We did. And you also agreed that you wouldn’t have anything to do with her outside class – remember?’

‘She came to my office. What was I supposed to do?’

‘Tell her you were busy. Have her make an appointment.’

‘I couldn’t. She was upset—’

‘Oh, David, please. She sheds some crocodile tears and immediately you cave.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

He thought for a moment, then alighted on the word. ‘Hard.’

I stood up and walked past him to the counter, threw the wine from my glass into the sink, a burgundy splash over the white surface. ‘That wine tastes too sharp.’

I turned on the tap and watched it sluicing down the
drain, took the dishcloth and held it under the water, then flicked off the tap and wrung it out. I started to clean the plughole, the taps, the area around the sink.

‘Why are you angry with me, Caroline?’

I wiped down the granite counter-top.

‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ he went on. ‘I haven’t been unfaithful.’

He must have seen the way I stiffened, for he continued in a tone of irritation more than apology: ‘I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was, it happened a long time ago, when I was free and single. I didn’t screw Linda behind your back – we weren’t together then. I never knew she was pregnant.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Of course not!’ His voice rose, for the first time a note of real anger in it. ‘She never told me. I never knew there was a baby. Not until Zoë came into my office that day. Caroline, none of this has happened to hurt you. It just happened, that’s all.’

He was so maddeningly rational. I had reached the end of the counter and pulled out the pestle and mortar. I saw a mark left on the counter. I went at it with the cloth, the perfect black circle it had made so stark against the natural veins running through the stone.

‘I feel like you blame me for all this,’ he said, ‘and it’s not my fault.’

‘I know it’s not your fault.’

‘It was just a mistake.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re going to rub a hole in the granite, the way you’re going.’

I flung the cloth into the sink. ‘It’s because of the baby.’

‘What baby?’

I turned, leaned back against the counter and gazed at him. ‘Our baby, David. The one we didn’t have.’

It took a moment for his expression to clear and I saw, with a shock, that he had pushed that whole painful episode in our history out of his mind. He had moved on.

‘Oh. That.’

‘You’d forgotten, hadn’t you?’ I asked.

His fingers went to the stem of his glass – there was still some wine in the bowl, which he began to swirl in a slow, meditative way. ‘I hadn’t forgotten. I just don’t think about it any more. It was so long ago, Caroline.’

I felt the counter behind me, the hard surface of it there to steady me. ‘She would have been twenty-one now,’ I said. ‘Or he.’

He put his glass down, his brow creasing with a pained expression.

I waited where I was – I wouldn’t go to him – and after a moment, he got up off the barstool, came over and put his arms around me, pulling me into his embrace. I don’t know how long we stood there, holding each other, and all the while I was trying to feel the warmth of his hug – the sincerity within it – but I kept thinking, He’s trying to silence me. Trying to close down that avenue of conversation.

He drew back, looked at me, our faces close to each other. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes. I’m fine.’

He held me there for another moment, then reached for the wine bottle and turned away.

‘Is that it?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Is that all you’re going to say on the subject?’

He stood at the other side of the counter, filling his glass again, the look of forbearance on his face making me want to scream. Patiently, he said: ‘It was a long time ago. I thought we’d put it behind us.’

‘You tell me about this girl – this daughter you fathered back when you were a student – and you never once think about our baby? The one we got rid of?’

My voice broke and I had to stop, feeling the rising commotion inside me. I wanted to tell him that when I met Zoë – when I looked at her – all I could think of was the pregnancy I had terminated. After so many years of holding it at bay, controlling it, never allowing it to cast its shadow over my life, here it was in front of me in the shape of that girl. All the memories of what had happened seemed stored up in her. I’d looked at her and felt myself being dragged back to a time when I was sick with fear and uncertainty, overwhelmed by the mistake we had made and the decision we’d had to face. Sitting alongside her in the sun, I’d felt as if I was back in the waiting room, a form attached to a clipboard on my knee, the deep-pile of the carpet underfoot, the crisp receptionist behind her wall of Perspex, and all the while my legs wouldn’t stop trembling. Twenty years old, in my final year at university, my whole life ahead of me. I had thought that once it was done I would feel relief. That I could forget. And I did. But there was also the slow advance of dread crawling up from that empty place, the awkward rumblings of conscience.

‘Anyway,’ I said, giving myself a shake as though to dispel the chill from the past. ‘It’s just nerves. All this waiting – it’s making me jumpy.’

He glanced up at me with a guarded expression.