Lifesaver (39 page)

‘Yes. We did it, what, three months ago?’ Adam glanced at me for confirmation and I felt nothing but shame.

‘It’s quite nice,’ she pronounced. Then she turned to me. ‘Adam’s explained that Max just had a virus,’ she said, her voice loaded with the censure that I felt myself.

I still couldn’t speak. Adam hugged me, and I was grateful for his kindness. ‘Poor Anna’s had a day of it. He really wasn’t well, and you know how frightening that is to see.’ But then in one fell swoop, he’d bracketed himself and her—the experience Max-carers - against me, the overdramatic leg-end who got everyone in a flat spin just for a bit of fever.

Adam must have stage-managed it, although I wasn’t aware how and when; but presently the three of us were sitting down drinking the long-awaited brandies. I hadn’t even noticed him go into the kitchen, but my tumbler had two ice-cubes in it which cracked like Adam’s knees and chilled my hand through the glass.

I wondered if Marilyn had been speaking to me whilst Adam had been getting the drinks, and decided that she couldn’t have done. She started talking, though, after Adam put the drink in her hand. She was talking to him as though I wasn’t even in the room. I waited, desperately hoping for a kind word, or the reassuring pressure of Adam’s palm pressing on my knee, but none came. I could have assumed myself to be invisible.

I forced myself, though the post-weeping fug and an ever-encroaching headache, to dip in and out of what she was saying. Her voice was simultaneously defensive and vulnerable, and she kept staring at me meaningfully, in a ‘must we really have this conversation with
her
here?’ sort of way.

‘...know it’s been months…orry I didn’t write, I honestly thought it would be better for Max to hear nothing than to get letters and calls from me…ut of sight, out of mind…eeded to clear my head...’

I know that feeling, I thought, blinking hard to try and sharpen up my vision, which was more blurry than it ought to have been. Adam sat motionless beside me, gazing intently at his wife. I had never felt further away from him.

She’s not even his ex-wife, I thought. He’s as married as I am. Strange how I’d never really considered that before. I leaned against the back of the sofa and fought a growing urge to close my eyes. I felt as if someone had dropped an anvil on my skull.

Marilyn stood up and walked over to the bookcase, picking up the photo of her and Max. She left a fug of perfume behind her; something floral and cloying that masked the faint smell of sick in the room, but which made my head hurt even more.

‘I can’t wait to see him,’ she said. ‘My baby. I’ve missed him so much.’

I vaguely noticed that although her legs were long, she had a big bottom, droopy in the unflattering jeans. I tried to imagine her and Adam in bed, but—thankfully - couldn’t. Instead, I saw them together at Max’s birth; her, puce and panting, him holding her legs and crying ‘I can see the head!’, and them beaming at one another when Max emerged, limbs like red tentacles, his mouth a little red ‘o’ of surprise. They were his parents.

‘Mummy?’ Suddenly Max was there, at the top of the stairs, with exactly the same expression on his face as I’d just imagined on him at birth: bleary amazement and wonder and delight. ‘Mummy! You came back! My
mummy
!’

Marilyn hurtled towards the stairs, Max started sliding unsteadily down, and they met in the middle in a giant confused cuddle, arms and legs everywhere, Marilyn sobbing loudly and Max half-laughing, half-crying as he patted and hugged, hugged and patted his mother. When I turned to look at Adam, I saw that there were tears on his cheeks.

‘Adam,’ I whispered, feeling that it would be an imposition to wipe away the tears, that it wasn’t my job any more. ‘I think I should go home.’

He dashed them away himself. ‘OK, Anna.’

He never called me Anna. Always ‘angel’ or ‘baby’ or ‘gorgeous’.

‘No, really,’ I went on, as if he’d tried to stop me instead of agreeing. ‘You and Marilyn have things to talk about. And to be honest, I’m not feeling too hot. I’ve got a terrible headache. Will you call me a cab?’

‘Of course.’ He got up, too quickly, picked up the telephone and speed-dialled the cab company, although his eyes never left the figures of his wife and child hugging on the stairs. It was as if he was itching to join in, I thought miserably.

‘….yes, to Wealton. As soon as possible please,’ he said on the phone, and I felt wretched. Marilyn was now sitting on the middle stair with Max on her lap, stroking his hair and holding him encircled in her arms. He glanced over at me through the banisters, but didn’t return my smile. He looked utterly blissed out, as if my kiss in his dreams had caused him to wake into this strange new world where he suddenly had his heart’s desire.

‘It’ll only be a couple of minutes,’ said Adam.

‘Right,’ I replied stiffly.

Adam was the only one who said goodbye to me when I left, but his farewell peck was perfunctory. ‘We’ll talk about…we’ll talk another time.’ he said with finality. The front door closed behind me, and I was alone on the pavement.

The cab ride back to Wealton was a blur of dark trees and too-bright streetlights hurting my eyes, and the voice of the cabbie swelling in and out of my consciousness. He was trying in vain to engage me in conversation, and it felt as if someone was sticking a pin in my leg to get a reaction. He appeared to be talking about his missing forefinger, in which he showed inordinate pride: ‘Oi expect you’re wonderin’ wha’ appened,’ he’d said, in a broad Wiltshire accent. ‘Larst ‘Arvest, it was. Helping muy brother bring in the wheat. Larst ‘Arvest.’ For one confused moment I’d thought his brother was a Norwegian named Lars Tarvest, but I didn’t even bother to respond, and when the driver looked in his rearview mirror and saw the tears dripping silently down my face, he finally desisted.

I wondered where Marilyn was going to sleep that night. Adam didn’t have a spare room. He’d probably offer his—our—bed to her, and sleep on the sofa. Or maybe she’d bunk in with Max, I thought, jealousy penetrating my befogged brain. The mental picture of Max in his low narrow bed curled around her like a question mark, drawing his thin limbs along her generous outlines was, oddly, more painful than the picture of her and Adam back in the marital bed - which was the other possible scenario.

Then I wondered if Adam had told her who I was yet, and if so,
how
he’d told her: in amazement and gratitude, or with disgust and hurt at my subterfuge and ulterior motives? Thankfully I felt too unwell to really dwell on it. Especially since there was so much more he didn’t even yet know.

When I opened the front door of my flat, the smell of rented accommodation filled my nostrils. I’d been living there for six months, and yet it still wasn’t my home. At first I’d felt free: now I felt as if I had no home at all. I kicked off my shoes and rolled into bed, fully clothed, aching from head to foot. I was shivering, and my head was pounding. I wanted to get up to find some painkillers, but it had got so bad that I knew if I moved, I would throw up. I lay still for some time, thinking about Marilyn and Adam, about Vicky and Peter, and about my Ken—if he could be described as mine anymore. Relationships were fragile, tenuous webs, spun with filigree threads of trust to keep them aloft, so thin that a puff of wind could break them - and yet we blundered through them with a reckless lack of care, and then seemed surprised when we destroyed them.

Ken had trusted me. That was why he hadn’t been asking questions about my other life, my job—because it had never occurred to him that I was lying. My earlier scorn of him and Adam and their blind, misguided faith in me dissipated, to be replaced by a deep, throbbing shame. If I’d only resisted Adam when we’d first hugged. A hug was nothing; but now look at us. Practically living together. It had just seemed so easy at the time, though, so right: to allow him to hold me in his arms, to feel the strength of his shoulders and the strangeness of his scent, the welcome touch of unfamiliar hands gently reaching under my cardigan and stroking my skin. In one second, it had been as if I hadn’t had any other ties at all. The entire cobweb of my life with Ken was swept away, no longer even existing for me at that moment in time. Instant gratification, I supposed. Or was it something deeper; the first real knowledge of love? How would I ever know which?

I must have lain in bed, shivering, for a couple of hours, and then I was suddenly boiling, my clothes sticking to my body. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ken. I wanted him. Either that, or I wanted not to hurt him. I didn’t want him sexually, but for the old comforting routines - I wanted him to bring me a bowl to throw up in (for I could tell that was on the cards), to stroke my hair and offer me cold glasses of water to sip from, as he had after my miscarriages. But he wasn’t there, and I was on my own.

Eventually I fell asleep, still fully clothed, almost grateful that I felt too ill to dwell on how miserable I was.

I was woken the next day, not by the usual alarm call of dog bark, duck squawk and sharp squares of sunlight, but by my phone. As I reached for it, woozy and still feeling sick, I realized that I couldn’t decide whose voice I most wanted to hear on the end of the line, Ken’s or Adam’s. Half and half. If either of them had ever decided to look in the Call History file of my phone, the game would have been up: under both Incoming and Outgoing calls the roll read
KEN, ADAM, KEN, ADAM, ADAM, KEN,
documented evidence to them both of The Other Man.

But it was neither of them. ‘Anna, darling, it’s Auntie Lil.’

Her voice sounded to me like the lavender wool of her suit and the yeasty scent of her towel cupboard. ‘I’m just telephoning to see how the little boy is. You were going to ring me and let me know…

I burst into weak, grateful tears, because there was someone there who cared about me, to listen. To make it better. To help me sort out the mess.

‘Anna? What’s happened?’

‘No. No, sorry, Lil, he’s fine—Max is fine. The doctor came and said it was just a nasty bug.’

‘Then what’s the matter?’

‘Oh Lil,’ I wailed. ‘Everything is such a disaster.’

‘Talk to me, my darling. Tell me all about it.’

‘I can’t tell you over the phone,’ I said feebly. ‘I’ve caught the same virus Max had, I think. I’m in bed, and I feel awful. But I really want to see you.’

‘Then come and see me. As soon as you feel well enough. Promise me you will, Anna.’

‘I promise,’ I said, feeling marginally better. ‘I’ll come home as soon as I’m fit to drive.’

It was a few more days, however, before I felt well enough to get back to see Lil, and by then everything had changed. I had a different story to tell her.

My flu symptoms subsided, but I couldn’t seem to shake the gastric part of the bug that Max had—I vomited so often that my voice was reduced to a painful raw croak, and I had a constant gnawing nausea in my gut. I began to wonder if it might not just be a belated sense of guilt kicking in.

Ken had just flown off on a long trip to Australasia and the Far East, and rang me often on my mobile, full of concern, and as my mouth spewed out lies in the same way it spewed out solids - ‘Two days off filming’/ ‘good chance to learn lines’/ ‘director sent flowers’—I thought how it served me right. I imagined Ken in the shadow of the Sydney Opera House, under blue Antipodean skies, making criminally expensive mobile-to-mobile phonecalls (because I’d told him I had no phone in my flat), to be fed a load more lies…it was horrible. I felt horrible.

Then came the call I’d been waiting for; the one I’d been too cowardly to make myself - Adam, ringing to say that we needed to talk. It was
Adam
I wanted, I realized, as soon as he spoke my name. Not Ken, after all. My feelings for Ken were complicated, marred by guilt, duty, obligation, habit. Adam was the one I loved.

‘I know we do,’ I said, feeling nauseous again. ‘When?’

We arranged to meet the following day, down by the canal.

‘So,’ said Adam politely, staring straight ahead of him. ‘Let me get this straight. You engineered a meeting with me, giving a false name, because you felt too responsible for Max to let us know that you were really the woman who gave him the bone marrow donation. Because in case he died, you’d blame yourself.’

Put like that, it sounded utterly selfish and preposterous.

‘Well…yes. Kind of. Although it’s not as simple as that,’ I said in despair, thinking of Holly’s tiny white coffin, and then of the clammy vol-au-vents after Dad’s funeral.

We were walking slowly along a canal side path, overhung with droopy willow branches and flanked by huge bushy stinging nettles. I pictured Max with us, swiping at them with a big stick, his thin bare shins at risk from their bite. If Adam and I had any chance at all of continuing our relationship - and I didn’t hold out much hope, not with Marilyn back on the scene—I knew I’d have to come clean and tell him about Ken too. And the fake job. There could be no more secrets.

‘Could you slow down a little bit? I’m still not feeling great… I tried not to sound aggressive, but wasn’t sure if I’d been entirely successful. I felt awful, actually, as if the blood in my legs had been drained out and replaced with sawdust. A duck landed on the water’s surface, splayed feet braking, listing like a light aircraft in a stiff breeze. I wanted the comfort of holding Adam’s hands, but they were out of my reach, shoved deep into his jeans’ pockets.

He stopped and faced me. Part of me really hoped he’d say, ‘and what other secrets have you been hiding from me?’, so that I could take a deep breath and begin to list them all. Alphabetically or chronologically, I hadn’t yet decided. There were so many.

‘You know I love you, Anna,’ he said, and for a second I wondered if we had more than a chance, if I’d got it wrong and he was going to propose instead.

I nodded. I had always nodded when he told me he loved me. Although I loved him too, I’d somehow never been able to bring myself to say those three words back to him—it was just one betrayal too far. Once or twice I’d muttered ‘you too,’ but, despite his hurt blue eyes, I’d never volunteered the information.