Got You Back (16 page)

After a fight over who was paying for lunch (Pauline and John won once James realized that they would be offended if he didn't let them), they ambled over to the cathedral and spent a perfectly pleasant hour looking at the tombs and the frescos, and then had tea in the Cloisters Refectory. At four o'clock James made a show of looking at his watch and said he ought to be hitting the road. The table for the following night, he told them, was booked for seven thirty. He would meet them at their hotel at seven and they could have a drink at the restaurant before they sat down to eat. He feigned disappointment that he wouldn't be able to see them during the day on Tuesday (he had, he told them, agreed to cover some of Simon's appointments in exchange for having the evening free) and left them deciding what they were going to do with the next few hours before
The Importance of Being Earnest
began at seven thirty.

Back at his car he pulled out his mobile phone and
called directory enquiries, who put him straight through to the reservations desk at Le Château.

‘I'm sorry, sir, we're fully booked in the evenings for the next two weeks,’ the supercilious man, with what James strongly suspected was a fake French accent, said when he had put in his request.

‘But it's for my parents. They're elderly. Tomorrow is the only night they can do.’

‘May I suggest you bring them in to lunch? We have a table at three.’

‘No, it has to be the evening. Oh, forget it,’ he said, and rang off. He'd just have to book somewhere else. It didn't matter where, as long as it was far enough away from Lower Shippingham. He'd just tell his parents when he picked them up that there had been a change of plan.

‘So apparently he's booked a table at somewhere called Sorrento for seven thirty. It's right by the hotel, he said. Do you know it?’ Stephanie had sneaked out to the kitchen to call Katie while Finn was watching CBBC. She couldn't risk saying anything in front of Finn, who had an antenna for secrets. He hated to be left out.

‘Never heard of it,’ Katie said.

‘Well, he's meeting them at the hotel first so they shouldn't be too hard to find. Are you scared?’

‘Terrified,’ Katie said convincingly.

‘Just remember, don't give too much away and don't say anything that'll upset Pauline and John.’

‘I know, I know. Just him seeing me ought to be enough to give him a coronary.’

‘Exactly,’ Stephanie said emphatically. ‘And call me when it's over.’

The next day Katie cooked James a large early dinner of chicken wrapped in Parma ham with Jersey Royal potatoes and asparagus. He had almost given himself away when he'd got home from work to find her standing over the stove. ‘It's a bit early for me,’ he'd said. ‘Will it keep warm? Maybe I can eat it later, after you've gone out.’

‘Not really,’ Katie had said. ‘Besides, it's six o'clock. We often eat at this time. And I didn't like to think of you sat here all on your own having beans on toast.’

She plonked the dishes on the table.

‘Maybe I'll just have a shower first,’ James had said, clearly thinking that if he delayed the start of the meal she would have to leave to get to her class on time, never knowing if he'd finished it or not.

Katie hugged him, steering him towards the table as she did so. ‘You've got all evening to have a shower. Sit down with me for a bit.’ She watched as he picked at the food on his plate. She pulled a disappointed face. ‘Don't you like it?’

‘It's great. I told you, I'm not very hungry yet. I had a late lunch.’

At six thirty James was still pushing his food round, eating the occasional small mouthful. Katie cleared away her plate, picked up her bag, kissed him lightly on the forehead and said, ‘I have to go. I'll be back by ten at the latest. Are you sure you'll be OK?’

‘I was thinking I might go down to the pub for one.’

‘Good idea,’ she said, and as she left she realized that he hadn't even wished her luck with her class.

She drove into Lincoln and parked up near the hotel. Sorrento was a couple of doors down, a sad-looking Italian with torn tablecloths and half-dead flowers in jars on the tables, their brown leaves drooping into the sugar bowls. A distraught fly buzzed around in the window, trying to find a way out. James had obviously struggled to get a table anywhere decent so last minute.

She sat in the car waiting for him to arrive, trying to go over in her head what she was meant to be doing. She needed James to see her and to see that she had seen him. Ideally she wanted to put him in a position where he'd have to admit that these people were his parents without, of course, anyone giving away the fact that he was still married to Stephanie. They didn't want to blow the major surprise this early on.

She looked at her watch. It was five to seven. Assuming that James had rushed out of the house almost as soon as she had left — pausing only to throw his uneaten dinner in the bin, of course, and to cover it up with other bits of rubbish so that Katie would never guess he hadn't eaten it — then he should be here any minute. She sat low in her seat. She didn't want him to spot her on the way in.

A few moments later and there he was, striding into the hotel foyer with all the confidence in the world. He was still in his work clothes so he had obviously left home in a hurry. Katie waited until he had gone in, then got out of her car and stood pretending to look in the window of a shop fifty metres or so along the street. Her heart
was pounding and she felt sick with anticipation. She stood there for what seemed like an age, and then he emerged with two old people in tow, a tiny woman who looked sweet and friendly, and a distinguished, white-haired man. Katie took a deep breath and walked forward: she had to reach them before they got to the restaurant.

23

James thought he was hallucinating at first. He was trying to explain to his parents how the reservation at Le Château had fallen through (‘Trouble in the kitchen, they've had to close down for the night’ was the best that he could do) and why, instead of just taking them over to the pub in Lower Shippingham, they were now going to eat at what looked like a greasy spoon.

‘What kind of trouble?’ his mother was saying. ‘Hygiene?’

‘I've no idea. Probably,’ he said, slandering Le Château even further.

‘What, though?’ Pauline persisted. ‘Rats? Cockroaches? It doesn't bear thinking about, really, does it?’

‘Well, anyway,’ James was saying, ‘this place is meant to be very good. Their chef came from Rome,’ he added, making things up off the top of his head. ‘He's well known in…’

A woman who looked just like Katie was walking towards them. Paranoia, he thought, was making him see things. The woman was staring straight at him. She really did look a lot like Katie and, of course, Katie was in Lincoln this evening, although her class would be under way by now. Nevertheless he tried to usher Pauline and John along but he couldn't seem to get them to move at more than a snail's pace.

‘In where, dear?’ Pauline was saying.

The woman was still heading his way. She had Katie's newly dyed red hair — which, by the way, was still making him feel rather unsettled. When he'd woken up this morning she had had her back to him and he had thought she was Stephanie, and it had taken him a moment to work out where he was and who he was with. She was wearing the clothes Katie had been wearing when she'd left the house, the flowing pink skirt and the white T-shirt with the soft baby pink mohair hoodie over the top. Shit, he thought. It's Katie.

There was a moment before she spoke when he felt as if he was moving very fast in a tunnel. He could hear the blood whooshing round in his head and he wondered, briefly, if he might black out. His mother was wittering on, something about Italian food and how you couldn't go wrong with it, except for sometimes when they got a bit carried away with the garlic, and he thought briefly about turning round and simply walking off in the other direction before Katie could catch him.

‘James?’

Too late.

He raised his eyebrows at her as if she might somehow understand telepathically what he was asking her to do. This was it. This was the moment when both Katie and his parents would find out about his double life.

‘Hello,’ he said, in a voice so falsely jovial he sounded a little insane. ‘What are you doing here?’

His parents had stopped and were smiling at this woman, who was obviously a friend of their son's.

‘I've got my evening class, remember?’ Katie said, in a
tone that gave nothing away. ‘Only I got the time wrong. It starts at seven thirty, not seven. So, I was just walking around, killing time.’

He waited for her to say more, to say, ‘What the hell are you doing here when I just left you at home eating dinner?’ but for some reason she didn't.

‘I'm just having a quick dinner with Pauline and John here,’ he said, gesturing towards the restaurant. If he could just get in there, away from her, everything might be OK. He would have time to conjure up a plausible story. Something about old family friends and phoning out of the blue. He started to move away, hoping his parents would take the hint and follow, but his mother, of course, was not going to miss an opportunity to say hello to one of his friends.

‘I'm Pauline,’ she said, ‘James's mum, and this is John, his dad.’

Katie just stood there looking at them all. There was still time to save the situation. OK, so he had lied to her about being estranged from his parents but he'd think of something. Just as long as she didn't say, ‘Hi, I'm Katie, I'm his girlfriend.’

‘ This is Katie,’ he blurted out. ‘She lives in the village.’ He looked at Katie and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. She would know what it meant — don't say anything — and, hopefully, sweet, unsuspecting Katie would still trust him enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. She wasn't the sort of woman who would ever have a public confrontation.

Luckily, she said nothing. She just smiled sweetly at his mother.

‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘We'd better go — don't want to be late for our table. ’Bye, Katie, nice to see you.’

He moved off towards the restaurant praying that she would just go away. If she did, if she was really that loving and innocent and generous that she would let him get away with whatever he was getting away with and be content to wait until later to hear an explanation, he swore to himself that he would make it up to her. He would never deceive her again. He kept his fingers crossed as he walked away and then he heard: ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’

‘You too, dear,’ his mother said.

James dared to look round just as Katie was walking off. She looked back briefly and frowned at him, out of sight of his mum and dad, as if to say, ‘What's going on?’, and he pulled what he hoped was a ‘trust-me’ face before ushering his parents through the door of Sorrento.

‘She seemed nice. Who was she again?’

‘Oh, just some woman from the village. She brings her dog into the surgery sometimes.’

James could feel that his heart was still on overdrive. Jesus, that had been close.

Concentrating on Reflexology Class One had not been easy. Katie had arrived a few minutes late, having got lost trying to find the college. Her head was all over the place, and she had turned left instead of right and by the time she had worked out where she'd gone wrong, she had been on the dual carriageway heading out of the city.

Once she'd reached the classroom she had muttered apologies to the lecturer, who was already in full flow with his introductory speech, smiled hesitantly at her new classmates and taken a seat at the back. She'd felt elated in one way, that she had pulled it off, that she had put James on the back foot and left him stewing about how he was going to handle the consequences, but at the same time the whole thing had made her uneasy. If their meeting had been truly accidental, if she hadn't known what she knew, then she had no doubt she would have introduced herself to Pauline and John as James's girlfriend and the whole sorry story would have come out. She couldn't believe James was stupid enough to have woven this elaborate web of lies in the first place. How could he ever have thought it would have a happy ending for any of the parties concerned? The truth was, she knew now, he had never been thinking about anyone other than himself. Well, she'd unsettled him now. That was a good thing.

She'd tried to concentrate on what the lecturer was saying and on the complicated diagrams of the human anatomy that had accompanied his talk. She had to keep her wits about her for her confrontation with James when she got home. She needed to be indignant about the way he had lied to her, to press for a satisfactory explanation without even giving a hint that she was aware of what was really going on. The one thing she knew was that he would never offer up the truth unless she actually presented him with it.

By the time she got home James was already there. He leaped out of his armchair before she had even had time
to close the front door behind her. ‘I can explain,’ he said.

Remember, Katie thought, be sweet, innocent Katie. Don't push it too far. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I'm listening.’

James had obviously been planning his speech and she decided to let him deliver it uninterrupted.

‘I couldn't tell you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to, but I couldn't. The truth, the absolute truth, is that my mum got in touch with me recently. She said she was sorry about how she'd been, and she wanted us to try and put it behind us. I invited them up to see if we could sort things out.’

He paused, and Katie wasn't sure if he had finished or not. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

‘But that's great. I just don't understand what all the secrecy was about.’

‘Because I haven't told them about you. That's why I had them stay in Lincoln, not over here. You see, I think it's a big step for them to accept that it's not my fault my marriage is over. I don't think in a million years they could cope with me telling them I was already with someone new. Not yet, anyway. They'd always be thinking that maybe we'd got together before Steph and I split up, that maybe you were the cause. And I'd really hate for them to have bad feelings towards you.’