Got You Back (2 page)

‘Hit a nerve, did I?’ he'd said, laughing along with her. ‘Upset because you know I'm right?’

Stephanie stared at the four words — actually, four words and a letter — and the three kisses. She hadn't meant to look. She wasn't the sort of woman who trawled through the messages on her husband's mobile phone while he was in the bath but today, when she had realized that he'd left his phone at home and had been scrolling through trying to find a number for the surgery's receptionist, Jackie, she'd found herself idly flicking through his texts looking for, well, nothing really, just looking. She had felt all the blood rush from her head as she'd looked to see who the message was from. ‘K’, it said. Just ‘K’. No Karen or Kirsty or Kylie to give her a clue. No Kimberley, Katrina or Kristen. Just ‘I'm really missing you. K xxx’, like there was only one person in the world whose name began with a K and James would know
exactly who that was. She was fumbling about for the phone's address book, trying to see if the person listed as ‘K’ had a number she recognized, when she heard the bang of the front door closing. Stephanie dropped the phone hurriedly, jumping away from it as if she'd been stung. She plunged her hands into the too-hot washing-up water in the sink and tried to look casual as James strode into the room.

‘Have you seen my phone?’ he asked, not even stopping to say hello.

‘No,’ Stephanie said and then she'd wondered why she hadn't just said, ‘Yes, it's over there.’ Because he might have noticed she'd been looking through his address book, that was why.

He cast a cursory glance round the room, rushed out again, and then she heard him running up the stairs. She grabbed the phone from under the chair where she'd dropped it, stabbed at the buttons till the main screen returned, then ran out into the hall.

‘James, I've found it. It's here,’ she shouted.

‘Thanks.’ He pecked her on the cheek as he took it from her. ‘I'd got as far as Primrose Hill,’ he said, rolling his eyes and heading out of the front door again.

‘Bye,’ she said sadly to his back. She closed the door behind him and sat down heavily on the stairs.

OK, she thought, I have to think about this rationally. I mustn't jump to conclusions. But it was the language, the over-familiarity, the three kisses rather than the routine one that everybody seemed to deem suitable on even the most official piece of office communication, these days. And why would he have a number in his phone
identifiable only as ‘K’? Because he didn't want her to know who it was, she thought.

She was tempted to look on James's computer, to go through his emails to see if she could find any clues, any hints of who K might be, but she knew she mustn't turn into one of those people. You'd start by glancing through his emails, next thing you knew you'd be steaming open his post or sniffing his shirt collars every time he came home, like a lovestruck dog. She had to give James the benefit of the doubt. The truth was that even though her marriage wasn't perfect, even though they didn't see enough of each other these days and when they did the routine of running a family seemed to get in the way of everything else, she would still never have thought he would turn to another woman. Not in a thousand years.

She just couldn't imagine he would have it in him, that, even if he was bored with her and tired of their marriage — and she had no real reason to believe that either of these things was true — he would do this to their child. Neither, if she was honest, could she imagine that another woman would throw herself at him, with his self-importance and his habit of poking about in his ears with a cotton bud while he was watching the TV. But maybe she'd got things completely wrong. She had to get out of the house before the lure of his computer became too much for her to resist. She had to get to the office and speak to Natasha. Natasha would know what she should do.

‘Don't do anything,’ Natasha said, when Stephanie had told her the whole story. ‘It'll turn out to be nothing and
then he'll just resent you for going through his texts. Why were you going through his texts anyway?’

‘I wasn't… I have no idea.’

‘Maybe it's from a bloke. Kevin or Kelvin or Keith?’

‘With three kisses?’

‘A metrosexual,’ Natasha persisted. ‘They're very free with their emotions. Or a gay admirer? Kieron? Kiefer?’

‘I don't think it's from a bloke.’

‘Or an aunt?’

‘No.’

‘Someone from work?’

‘Three kisses.’

‘I agree it doesn't look good. Just don't do anything in a hurry, OK? Sleep on it.’

‘OK,’ Stephanie said reluctantly. She always took Natasha's advice.

‘Shit,’ she said, five minutes later. ‘I've just realized. That bracelet he gave me for our anniversary — he's feeling guilty. That's why he spent so much. It wasn't an expression of love, it was an apology.’

2

Stephanie couldn't get James out of her head all day. Since they'd moved to London three years ago it had felt like they had hardly seen each other. The deal was that he would only put up with living in the city if he could split his week between his old rural practice near Lincoln and his new job, declawing Bengal cats and devising diets for overweight dogs in rarefied St John's Wood. He didn't want to give up his work with farm animals, he'd said. That was what he'd trained for. To work with real livestock, working animals, not the pampered pets of the upper-middle classes. Dairy cows and abattoir-bound lambs, not Fluffy and Precious and Mr Paws. So now he left for the country every Sunday morning and returned to London on Wednesday evenings, tired and irritable from all the upheaval. He had a whole other life up there, she thought miserably. Why had she always thought it so unlikely that there could be another woman up there too? He had means, opportunity, motive. It was the perfect crime.

In the early days she had thought she might travel up and down with him sometimes, but as soon as Finn had settled into his primary school it had seemed ridiculous to uproot him every few weeks. And, besides, it had actually felt like a relief to have one less person to worry about for a few days at a time. It was inevitable, though,
that with so much time spent apart their close ties would start to unravel. That their two worlds would overlap less and less. He had never been very interested in her job anyway, not fully understanding how life-threateningly crucial it was that the new face of
Holby City
didn't turn up to an awards do wearing the same dress as one of Girls Aloud.

When she'd first met James she had moved back home to her parents’ house in Bath to save money. She had accidentally run over a neighbour's cat in her Citroën and, traumatized, had taken it straight to the local vet where James was, at the time, doing some on-the-job training. The cat, sadly, had failed to pull through, despite James's best efforts, but somewhere in the middle of the blood, guts and tears he had asked Stephanie out for a drink and she had agreed. Tiddles's loss had been her gain.

James, it seemed, had been as wowed by her ambition and skill as she had been by his. It was love at first sight. Well, lust and a bit of a rapport, which was all you could realistically hope for. But, somewhere along the line — somewhere, that was, around the time she had found she was pregnant with Finn — James had persuaded her to give up her lofty dream to be the new Vivienne Westwood and move into something less all-consuming, something which would allow her to spend time with the baby.

At first he had been supportive — it had been his idea, after all — encouraging her move into freelance dress-making and enjoying all the extra home comforts her working part-time — and in the spare room — afforded him. But then, three years ago when she had decided she wanted more, that she wanted to get back on the path to
having a career rather than just a job, and had persuaded him to buy the house in London so that she could be near the young women with too much money and little enough style of their own that they were happy to employ someone to find their clothes for them, she had soon realized that he was actually a little embarrassed by her work.

‘Stephanie dresses people who can't dress themselves,’ he would say to their friends, finding himself hilarious. ‘No, she's not a carer, nothing so worthy.’

Remembering this, Stephanie flung a pile of dresses, which had just been sent over from La Petite Salope, on to the sofa just as Natasha came in from the tiny room next door holding up a red shift. ‘Is Shannon Fearon a size sixteen?’ she asked, mentioning a young ex-soap opera actress who had recently shot back into the public eye by winning a celebrity singing competition, and who Stephanie was dressing for a photo shoot that afternoon.

‘Really or officially?’

‘Really.’

‘She is.’

‘OK, well, this might do.’ Natasha started to unpick the size sixteen label in the neck of the dress, then rooted through a small metal box and found a label marked ‘size ten’ to replace it. It was always good to make the client feel skinny and confident. That way, if a journalist asked how big they were, they could reply that they were well under the average size for a British woman, without giving away that they were clearly talking rubbish with a sub-conscious downward flick of the eyes.

‘Fine,’ Stephanie said, without looking.

Natasha sat down, moving the crumpled pile of dresses out of the way. ‘Stop dwelling on it,’ she said, ‘because you'll turn it into something even if it's nothing. Don't worry about things before you have to. That's my motto.’

‘One of them,’ Stephanie said.

Natasha had worked alongside Stephanie as a pattern cutter when Stephanie was still in her dress-maker phase and then had readily agreed to come along in the role of assistant when Stephanie had set herself up as a stylist five years later. She didn't want any responsibility, she'd said. Work, to Natasha, was something you did during the day. Then you went home and forgot about it. Natasha had a lovely home with a husband who worshipped her and three well-behaved, neat children. She had never had to worry about random text messages or what Martin was up to for half the week. Consequently her face was almost free of lines and she looked at least five years younger than the forty-one it said on her birth certificate. Over the years she had become much more friend than colleague. ‘Mock if you want but you know I'm always right,’ she said now.

‘Of course you are,’ Stephanie said fondly. ‘I'll try. It just makes me so angry that some silly cow might have turned his head, tried to steal my husband from under my nose without even thinking about me and my life. And my son.’

‘You don't know that.’

‘No,’ Stephanie said. ‘I don't know that.’

But the thought wouldn't leave her head. What else could it mean, after all? I'm really missing you. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.

She couldn't concentrate at the photo shoot and found herself snapping at Shannon when she'd complained that a particular dress made her look fat. ‘That's because you are fat,’ Stephanie had wanted to scream, although that would have been unfair. Shannon was most definitely not fat but she was short and disastrously proportioned so she had a tendency to look dumpy. In the end Natasha had suggested that Stephanie go home early before a fight broke out.

Luckily Finn was already there, playing ball in the tiny garden with Cassie, the nanny, so Stephanie could occupy herself with making him snacks.

Finn, at seven, could still be cajoled into keeping her company, and even though usually she would be cross with him for playing his favourite new game of rolling cherry tomatoes off the kitchen table and trying to make them land in the cat's bowl (one point if they went in the water, two if they landed in the Whiskas), she was so grateful to have a distraction that she just let him get on with it. Just after six she heard the front door open and slam shut again.

‘Hello,’ she heard James call.

‘Hi,’ she managed to shout back, weakly

He headed straight upstairs without stopping by the kitchen to see her. Not that this surprised her: he usually went up to the bedroom and changed out of his work clothes then settled down with the newspaper till dinner-time. He rarely asked her what she had done at work, and if he did, she normally didn't answer truthfully because he would only roll his eyes or make some sarcastic remark that he thought passed as a joke. If she was being honest
with herself she would have realized she hardly ever asked him what had happened at the surgery either. She loved animals but she couldn't rustle up much interest in stories about their ingrowing claws or dodgy hips. But Stephanie had always believed that all marriages went through this stage when there were young children around. There were simply more things to worry about, other considerations that were more important than ‘Did you have a good day at work?’ She had thought they would come out the other side of it once Finn was a bit older, and live out a blissful old age together, with all the time in the world to indulge in idle chat. She'd obviously been delusional, she thought now, pounding a chicken breast until it was nearly see-through. She stopped when she saw Finn, white-faced, at her elbow.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked, in his best grown-up voice, a mimic of the way she said it to him several times a day.

She bent down and kissed the top of his head. ‘I'm fine, darling.’

‘You don't look OK,’ he said stubbornly.

His face was creased with worry, and Stephanie felt guilty for having allowed her mood to affect him. She picked up a tomato and rolled it along the table from which it dropped on to the head of a startled Sebastian and bounced off his ear, into his organic chicken in gravy.

Try as he might, Finn couldn't hold back a smile. ‘Excellent,’ he said.

3

If you had asked James Mortimer how his life was — and if he had been in the mood to tell you the truth, because, actually, he had confided in no one over the last year, knowing that to tell one person would be to tell the world — he would have told you it was complicated. That he loved his wife Stephanie, deep down, but that somewhere along the line it had all got a bit safe and maybe even a little dull; that he adored his son and would never want to hurt him; that he had feelings for Katie that bordered on love, and that when he was with her he felt alive and invigorated in a way that routine family life no longer had the power to make him feel.