Love Is a Secret (43 page)

‘And  would you like to stay?’ continued Karen.

Another nod but this time, in his direction. ‘So long as that man doesn’t get all stressy with me.’ She leaned forward. ‘Big, aren’t you? You remind me of Elvis without his hair. I used to know him.’ She flicked back her bunches which were tied up with little purple beads like an overgrown teenager. ‘When I was in films.’

In films? Probably a cleaner at Elstree. As for Elvis, that was a new one although he did have the kind of face that everyone thought they knew, ranging from Jeremy Clarkson to William Hague. But how dare she say he was stressed. He was just mystified by what Tatty had told him. Flummoxed, as Nancy had put it. (‘Bloody heck’, had been Clive’s reaction when he’d told him over an after-work Perroni.)

‘Poor you.’ The older woman with the mousy hair turned to him. She really did have the most striking eyes – almost like Nancy’s sapphire earrings –  although the eyeshadow didn’t do her any favours. Gorgeous voice, though. ‘None of us meant to upset you. Maybe it’s because you’re the only man here and, unfair as it is, we’re taking some of our anger out on you. Why don’t you tell us your story?’

There was an awkward silence as several pairs of eyes fixed on him. Tell them everything, Clive had encouraged before he’d left that evening. They won’t be shocked. They’re women.

‘All right.’ He stared straight ahead. ‘I asked Tatiana to leave because I found out she was seeing someone else.’ He looked around the group challengingly. ‘Another woman.’

He waited for someone to say something. Maybe the words hadn’t come out of his mouth after all. ‘You know. A dyke. Lesbian. Whatever you’re meant to call it now. I just don’t understand it. It’s never happened to me before. Never! And I need to find out why.’ He leaned forward urgently. ‘Was it something I did?’

Still nothing. Did he have to say it all again? And what was that noise?

To his horror, he could see the enormous woman in violet throwing back her head, revealing a row of gold fillings. The bitch was laughing at him. Or was it singing? She was rocking herself back and forward with a funny crooning noise coming out of her.

As for the other noise, he knew that well enough. Had recognised it immediately even though he’d denied it when Clive had found him, head bent over the microwave.

‘There, there.’ Karen was rocking him in her arms – flabby yet wonderfully soft –  hugging his sobs so tightly that he could smell her heady sweet perfume, rather like Viv used to wear. ‘Don’t cry, Eddie. You’re with friends now. That’s why this session is called GETTING TO KNOW YOU. It’s going to be all right. I promise.’

‘Wait!’

The purple woman had jumped up and was pointing to the flipchart. ‘I’ve just got it!’

Got what?

‘It’s not HAPPINESS IS NOWHERE! It’s HAPPINESS IS NOW HERE! That’s what it means. Doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Ed heard Karen saying. ‘Providing you look at life the right way. And that’s exactly what ‘How To Survive Divorce’ is all about. See you next month everyone!’

6

LIZZIE

‘Mummy, Mummy! Can we get a Shit Zoo like Harry and the Bitch in Boden? It isn’t any trouble. It just poos in his mum’s handbag instead of the pavement.’

How could he think of
dogs
at a time like this? Lizzie undid the top button of her Artigiano jeans (thanks to comfort eating, she’d gone up one and a half belt holes since Tom had left) and searched Jack’s earnest little face for signs of stress from the last few weeks. Nothing! Nothing to indicate they were now officially a One Parent Family. Her son’s usual little pert nose was pink with excitement and his eyes bright, feverishly pleading with her to say yes. He’d been like this all his life, almost as though he was fixated on the need to have something. Anything. A new computer game. A pair of football shorts like Beckham’s even though he didn’t play the game (Jack, that is). The violin – God, that had been a mistake! And now a shiatsu dog, as if they didn’t have enough on their plate already.

She and Tom had argued incessantly over Jack and his inability to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. ‘There’s something wrong with him,’ Tom would snap as though it was her fault.  So she’d taken him to the doctor who’d suggested mackerel and Omega 3 (Jack loathed fish and besides, tablets always stuck in his throat) and then she’d taken him on the rounds of acupuncturists, cranial osteopaths and homeopaths (all of which she’d got free through writing about them) and still Jack was the same. She’d just have to make sure he got a Saturday job at Waitrose when he was older, to teach him some manners.

‘No.’ Lizzie tried to speak firmly but kindly the way the last therapist had advised her. ‘We can’t have a Shit Zoo. I mean shiatsu. There isn’t anyone at home all day to look after it.’

That was true enough. If it wasn’t for her parents who usually looked after the kids in the holidays, she’d never have managed to hold down her job. Being editor of
Charisma
was a 25/7 role. Tom never got that. Since moving into computers, he’d got awfully serious.

‘You’re so competitive!’ Tom had snapped before leaving. ‘Always putting your work first.’

That wasn’t fair. And if she
was
(competitive that is), it was because of the way she’d been brought up. Maybe, if she hadn’t been an only child or hadn’t been the first member of the family to go to university,  it might have been different. Maybe, if she hadn’t gone into something as cut-throat as journalism, she might have been less stressy.

Jack had thrown himself down now, and was beating the kitchen floor – recently laid with some rather lovely, free mock-Victorian tiles as part of a Home Style feature – with his little stubby fists. ‘I’m bored! I want a dog to play with!’

Bored was good, wasn’t it? Character-forming. They’d just done a piece on it; on how kids
should
have nothing to do sometimes, so they have to rely on their own resources.

‘Don’t be so mean, Mum. If you won’t get me one, I’ll ask Dad. Sharon will look after it.’

Lizzie gasped. How could he be so brazenly callous? It was precisely three weeks and four days ago that she’d explained, oh so carefully, that Daddy had gone to live with Freddie and Ellie’s mum for a bit (she’d been unable to bring herself to say ‘forever’) but that he would come over every weekend and take them out somewhere nice.

Sophie had stared at her silently, while Jack bombarded her with questions. How long was a bit? Was it another sleepover? Why couldn’t they go too?

‘This isn’t fair,’ Lizzie had said on the phone to Tom. ‘You’ve got to come over and tell them face to face.’

‘All right.’

She could hear the tremor in his voice.

‘I have to say, Lizzie, you’re being very grown up about this.’

She was, wasn’t she? Maybe it was because none of this was real. As though she had been someone else on that day when she’d found her husband’s toothbrush with the hamster’s signature in her best friend’s bathroom cabinet. As though it had been another woman who had calmly walked out of the house, a child in each hand, ignoring Sharon’s flustered excuses (‘Please wait, Lizzie, I can explain.’). Another woman who paced the kitchen, waiting for her husband to come home before silently handing him the toothpaste; the one that she used to joke made her nostrils clear.

‘Do you love her?’ she finally asked after he had sat down, equally silent across the glass, boat-shaped coffee table (that Tom had insisted on buying even though she loathed it) while the kids lounged  in front of the television next door.

He had nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’ His eyes held hers as though he was scared too. ‘But we married before we really knew our minds, Lizzie. We’re still young enough to start again. Don’t you think?’

‘We can?’ Jack began jumping up and down, yanking her back to the present where frankly she’d rather not be. ‘You mean it, Mummy? Not like last time. We can have a Shit Zoo?’

She hadn’t said that! But his little eyes looked so hopeful and they’d been through so much, as Karen had pointed out gently, at the meeting. ‘OK. I’ll think about it.’

Jack whipped out his Blackberry (had Tom given him that too?). ‘How long do we have to wait? One week? Two?’

‘Tell you later. Now get ready for school, can you? We’re late.’

Sophie appeared as if from nowhere at the door of the sitting room. Had she been listening? ‘There isn’t any school. It’s half term.’

Shit. Sorry. Sugar. Of course it was.

‘What have you been drinking?’ Sophie picked up her polka dot mug, sniffing it with her disdainful look. Since when had ‘Lack of Respect’ popped up as an Options subject?

‘Coffee.’

‘So why does it smell funny?’

Because it’s got a large dollop of whisky in it, that’s why.

‘It’s a new blend I’m trying out for the Lifestyle Pages.’ She flicked back her hair defensively. ‘We’ve all been asked to do it.’

Sophie gave her a cool look. ‘So are we going or not?’

‘Where?’

‘To Ellie’s birthday party, of course. It’s on your calendar.’

Ah yes, the wall calendar with Scenes of Buckinghamshire, bearing her loopy writing with dates written in before September 26th. The day which had changed her life forever. And why not? Hadn’t she just agreed with herself that enough was enough? She’d march round to Sharon The Slut and demand an explanation for stealing her husband and destroying her children’s future.

‘OK.’ Lizzie tried to wobble her way upright. ‘But you’re not wearing that skirt are you?’

Another disdainful look from her daughter. ‘Course not. I’m wearing one that’s much shorter.’

‘Mummy?’

It was Jack now.

What?

‘Am I adopted?

WHAT?

‘Cos
she
says I am.’

‘Sophie ! How could you?’

Her daughter shrugged. ‘Just wondered. Everything else has changed, hasn’t it. Besides, he’s so different from me.’

How could she be so mature for her age? When
she’d
been twelve, she’d still been into Pom Pom Pets. ‘Well he’s not. And nor are you. And of course you’re different because siblings are.’

‘What are siblings?’

‘Brothers. Sisters.’

‘Then why don’t you have one, Mum?’

Sharon was meant to have been her substitute sister even though they were so different. They had sometimes joked about that.

‘Don’t know. Now come on. Let's get ready for the party.’

Sharon opened the door almost immediately, as though she was expecting her, which no doubt she was. Those kids’ mobiles were the equivalent of jungle drumming. Sophie had probably texted Ellie to say that they were coming and . . . oh God, why was her heart beating so wildly? Lizzie felt sick, as though it was
her
who had run off with another woman’s husband and not her so-called friend. It wasn’t even as though she was Tom’s type. Sharon was pretty-ish but she was huge! On the other hand, she could test-drive for Gossard – knew it too. Why else did she keep wearing those low cut tops like a mobile pick’n’mix?

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ was all Sharon said. Lizzie glanced in the hall mirror automatically (great – now she had a stress spot on her chin), squeezed past the shoe rack and into the kitchen.

Suddenly all the anger came bubbling out of her mouth like Sharon’s new steaming silver espresso machine which, shit-sorry-sugar, she’d even helped her choose at Ikea last month. ‘Why? Why did you do it to me?’

Sharon didn’t bother turning round. Her voice was level and matter of fact as though she was discussing a new recipe for kids’ packed lunches: not edged with panic like the last time. ‘We fell in love. We didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.’

She didn’t sound it. ‘But you ‘fell in love’ with someone else’s husband. My kids’ father. Don’t you feel one shred of guilt?’

Sharon turned and this time, close up, Lizzie could see tell-tale dark circles under her eyes. ‘Of course I do but I couldn’t help it. Neither of us could.’

Lizzie wanted to fling the coffee across the table. ‘YOU JUST HAD TO SAY NO! For crying out loud, I’ve told you stuff about Tom. Stuff I’d never tell anyone else.’

She faltered, remembering how she’d confided, not long ago, that Tom was always too tired in bed. She’d even asked Sharon if she thought that was normal and her ‘friend’ had gone all quiet and asked how Lizzie could expect her, Sharon, a single mother, to know that sort of thing any more. And Lizzie had felt terrible; selfish even for forgetting that ‘poor’ Sharon was on her own. How naïve was that?

‘How long has it been going on for, anyway.’

‘Two months.’ Sharon coloured slightly. ‘Just after the kids broke up for the summer holidays. You were away. Again.’

Two months? Tom had said it was ‘a few weeks’. Two days would have been better. ‘Not at all’ would have been best; then she could wake up from this ridiculous treacle nightmare.

Lizzie stood up and then sat down. Why wouldn’t her legs work? Sharon was beginning to look less confident now, sitting there, at the table, her eyes fixed on an imaginary mark on the wall behind Lizzie, the way their pilates teacher told them to,  two bright pink spots on each cheek.

‘But when were you going to tell me?’ Lizzie thumped the table with her fists.

There was a silence during which Lizzie felt a flutter of hope. ‘Because it’s over now’, she could almost hear Sharon saying. ‘Because we’ve realised it’s a terribly selfish thing to do and we want to forget it ever happened.’ Could she, Lizzie, forget? Yes! Yes! Anything to bring back the normality of family life.

‘Soon. We couldn’t put it off any longer. I’m not going to be a single mother any more, you see. So you won’t be able to write about me again.’

Lizzie winced. That had been another feature Sharon hadn’t been very happy about even though she’d been paid for it. The magazine had used her as a case history in a ‘
How Single Mums Cut Corners’
piece and Sharon had got a bit miffed when Lizzie had slipped in the bit about Sharon dropping off the kids on the corner instead of seeing them in through the school gates so she could get to work on time.

‘What do you mean you’re not going to be a single mother any more?’

Sharon’s eyes gleamed, meeting hers challengingly. And suddenly, Lizzie knew with a sickening lurch in her stomach, exactly what she was going to say.

‘I’m going to have your husband’s baby. So it’s over now, Lizzie. You’ve lost. Deal with it.’