Scissors, Paper, Stone (19 page)

He saw her and smiled, his shoulders relaxing.

‘There you are,’ he said, walking over. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Charlotte, even though she knew her voice implied it was anything but.

‘What are you drinking?’

‘Paint stripper.’

He forced a smile. ‘Oh dear. Well, can I get you something different?’

‘No, don’t worry. This cost me £3.80, after all. I refuse to be defeated.’

He looked relieved then, and the atmosphere lifted slightly.

‘OK. I’m just going to the loo and then I’ll get a drink.’ He removed his coat and dumped it beside her, stooping down as he did so to kiss her on the lips. ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said, and Charlotte felt herself enveloped by warmth. She smiled. It was going to be all right.

‘Hello, you.’

He walked to the tiny box-room that doubled as a lavatory at the back of the pub and Charlotte noticed he had left his briefcase on the seat next to her. It was open and there was a hardback book inside. Still looking for something to read, she took it out and saw that it was a second-hand copy of
Great Expectations
, the title picked out in black sans serif letters against a white-and-red cover. She opened the cover and saw ‘£5.50’ scribbled in pencil in the upper right-hand corner of the flyleaf. She turned the page and her stomach lurched. A cold, creeping dread trickled down her spine.

‘To my darling Gabriel,’ read the handwritten inscription. ‘To remind you of our wet weekend in Cornwall, keeping warm by the open fire. And to remind you how much I love you, always. Your loving wife, Maya.’

The handwriting was black and round and flowing, the letters curved and plump against the brown-yellow of the paper. It was an artistic sort of writing, its elegance heightened by its apparent careless ease. It was the kind of handwriting Charlotte wished she possessed, the kind that made her feel instantly inferior and pedestrian. She knew it was ridiculous, but looking at that dedication and thinking of all the intimate subtleties that it suggested, she found herself wishing that Maya’s handwriting were easier to dismiss. If she only wrote with teenage silliness, dotting her ‘i’s with round circles, making the letters squat and unglamorous, expressing something straightforward and unromantic, Charlotte would find it far less threatening. Instead, it seemed simultaneously sophisticated and intelligent. There were three kisses underneath her name, a row of xs scattered like bullet-holes across the page.

She saw Gabriel approaching the table, a pint in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, taking great care not to spill anything as he wove between the higgledy-piggledy tables.

‘Here we are,’ he said, putting the drinks down and sliding in beside her on the bench. Then he noticed the book open in front of him and Charlotte could see his eyes register the dedication. She saw that he swallowed loudly and then quickly started to assess whether he had done anything wrong, taking a sip of his pint to play for time. A thin line of foam, like the trace of white bubbles left behind by a wave on a beach, formed across his top lip.

‘So,’ he cleared his throat, ‘you’ve found my copy of
Great Expectations
?’

‘Evidently,’ said Charlotte, her voice clipped.

He closed the book and slipped it back into his bag. And then he waited, silent, bracing himself for what was coming next.

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘Not particularly,’ he said, a spikiness to his tone.

‘Really? You don’t want to tell me about your glorious weekend in Cornwall, snuggling up together in front of roaring open fires?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Charlotte . . .’

‘Because I’d be interested. No, honestly, I’d be extremely interested to hear all about the wonderful times you had with your ex-wife.’ She spat out the last word angrily.

Gabriel kept his voice quiet and level, whispering urgently as he always did when he wanted to portray himself as the reasonable one.

‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what exactly you were doing rifling through my briefcase?’

‘I wasn’t rifling –’

‘Because I don’t think that is the behaviour of someone who is meant to trust me – no, more than that, someone who professes to love me –’

‘And I don’t think that someone who professes to love me should be carrying around romantic trinkets from another woman.’

‘I wasn’t carrying it around –’ He noticed his voice was getting louder and made an effort to regulate it. ‘I was rereading a favourite book –’

‘Oh, it’s your favourite book, is it? How charming. How sweet that you got to share that with her.’ She heard her voice coming out in a stream of vitriol and she hated it but at the same time, she couldn’t stop. She felt so unbelievably angry and her distress was so righteous, so unfettered, that she couldn’t help but allow all her irrationality to boil over, steaming out of her like a hot–cold cloud of liquid nitrogen.

And the thing was, she knew it was irrational. She had books that ex-boyfriends had given her and had written in, but the difference was that she would never carry them around with her to read. She would care enough about Gabriel’s feelings not to take the risk that he would see anything that could hurt him. But beyond that, she thought, hissing and spitting with internal rage, the difference was that she had never bloody well been married.

Gabriel stared at her. She kept his gaze for several silent seconds, then dropped her eyes and took a substantial glug of wine.

‘I forgot that she’d written in the book,’ he said, talking slowly. He sighed. ‘I suppose when you’re in a relationship, even if you’re not meant to be with the person you’re with and on some level you acknowledge that, deep down . . . I suppose the thing is that you carry on making gestures, however hollow they might be because you’re play-acting, in a way. It doesn’t mean anything –’

‘Of course it means something. She talks about how much she loves you “always”.’

‘But the point is, Charlotte, that I’m not with her, am I? I love you. I’m with you.’

He laid his hand over her clenched fist and stroked her fingers, coaxing them out, unfurling them so that she found herself holding his hand and it felt warm and soft against her skin. She didn’t look at him.

‘I’ll stop reading it,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ve read it so many times anyway that it’s getting to be a bit boring.’

But for days afterwards, Charlotte found herself becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of Maya. The handwriting seemed to have given Gabriel’s ex-wife a life of her own, a shape, a sense, a hint of the sort of woman she might be. Until now, Charlotte had been able to treat her as a two-dimensional cut-out, a woman whom Gabriel did not love and, therefore, a woman who possessed none of her qualities or attractions or talents; a woman who need not trouble her.

The discovery of the book had challenged all those assumptions and shown them to be hopelessly superficial. Because the truth was that however he felt now, Gabriel had loved Maya once; had loved her enough to marry her; had believed that this love would last a lifetime. And wasn’t the inevitable conclusion therefore that Maya and Charlotte probably shared some common attributes? That Gabriel had ‘a type’?

A love of books, for instance, when previously Charlotte had thought that her long, wine-fuelled literary discussions with Gabriel were specific to their relationship. She had flattered herself that she possessed a cleverness, a kindred taste for the intellect that must have been sorely lacking in his former partner.

Or something as trivial as liking open fires. Or buying second-hand editions of
Great Expectations
in out-of-the-way charity shops or jumble sales. All of these things Charlotte had believed were in some way hers. They were what made her charming and unique. And now she felt she couldn’t do any of them without somehow recalling the spectre of the woman who went before.

The thought gnawed away at her. She found herself rifling through Gabriel’s wallet when he wasn’t looking, scanning its contents for clues pertaining to his past life. She checked the text messages on his phone when he was in the bathroom, in a curious, half-paranoid frenzy. She wanted to find something incriminating to justify her suspicions, to prove that she had been right all along to mistrust him, but the bigger part of her simultaneously dreaded discovering he had been lying.

It turned out that there was nothing remotely sinister in either his wallet or his phone, but still she could not entirely escape the low buzz of discomfort. So she did something she could not explain, even to herself. She scrutinised Gabriel’s driving licence and memorised the home address. She recognised the road name – Ellingham – as a residential street in the part of Shepherd’s Bush that most locals like to convince themselves is actually the slightly posher part of Hammersmith.

One Wednesday lunchtime, when the two company directors huddled into a small office for something they grandly called a ‘board meeting’, Charlotte scurried to her car with her Pret à Manger chicken sandwich in one hand, the keys in the other. She felt absurdly underhand, like a bad spy being chased by a nebulous gang of assassins sent out on the orders of a podgy man with a white cat on his lap. She hastily opened the door and clambered in, slinging her bag and the sandwich into the passenger seat. An empty cup of coffee lay crumpled on the floor and as Charlotte looked at it, she found herself wondering whether Maya’s car was as unkempt as hers. If, indeed, she had a car. Perhaps, thought Charlotte, she was a terribly worthy environmentalist who cycled everywhere looking impossibly glamorous with toned limbs and a special luminescent tailored jacket.

She turned the key in the ignition and set off. Within fifteen minutes, she was indicating to turn into Ellingham Road. She drove carefully over the road humps, scanning the passing front doors for numbers. As she got closer to number 12, she felt her heart beating noisily against her rib cage. Then, suddenly, there it was: a door painted duck-egg blue, a neat front garden that was mostly patio and a windowbox with straggly red geraniums. Charlotte parked as close as she could and waited, munching on her sandwich, her eyes trained on the door.

Although it was lunchtime, Charlotte had picked up from Gabriel that Maya worked from home on Wednesdays. She was an interior decorator and worked on a word-of-mouth basis for private clients. She was, Gabriel had said unthinkingly, incredibly good at what she did. At the time, Charlotte had filed away the comment as yet another thing to try not to be hurt by, but now it came back to her with its full, prickling force.

No wonder the front of the house looked so well-tended. She compared it to the windows of her own ground-floor flat, the paint peeling, the wood rotting, the panes of glass covered in a thin layer of grime and, in one spot that she had not got round to cleaning, the amoebic mark of a stranger’s spittle.

Halfway through her second sandwich, the blue door shifted backwards. At first, Charlotte couldn’t make anything out apart from the dim shadow of the hallway and the sound of a woman’s voice.

‘OK, yeah, sure,’ came the voice. It sounded upper class but accessibly so; the sort of casual, consonant-dropping poshness that only the truly privileged can carry off. It sounded like the voice of a person who had been privately educated but who prided themselves on their liberal egalitarianism. It was the voice of someone who felt they had nothing to prove, a person comfortable in their own skin. ‘I’ll see if I can pop round first thing tomorrow if that suits you?’ the voice continued. ‘Great. OK, darling. Speak later.’ Then, there she was, walking out of the house, snapping shut a mobile phone and slipping it into an expensive-looking handbag. Maya was petite, shorter than Charlotte and with smaller proportions – slim shoulders, tapered waist, a gentle curve of bust. She was wearing several different colours that shouldn’t work together and yet somehow did – a coral pink blouse with delicate puffed sleeves, a pale grey skirt that stopped above the knee. She had bare, tanned legs with just a shading of calf muscle and extremely high heels in the same patent black leather as her handbag.

It surprised Charlotte to see that she was blonde. Her hair was bobbed to just below her ears, curled under as if it had been professionally blow-dried, and highlighted. Her face was striking rather than beautiful: she had a strong jaw and an aquiline nose, but she had good cheekbones and an aesthetically pleasing dip where her cheek slid into her chin. Her make-up was impeccable: glossy lips, subtle bronzer and neatly arched eyebrows. The top three buttons of her blouse were undone, revealing a flash of pert cleavage. She looked like the kind of woman most men would find sexy and most women would think was a newsreader.

Analysing it objectively, Charlotte could see that she was naturally prettier than Maya but she could also see that she made less of an effort to appear so preternaturally groomed. She couldn’t work out if this was a good thing or not. And however reassuring she should find it that they looked so different physically, Charlotte instead felt it was rather worrying. If that was the type of woman Gabriel had loved so much he ended up marrying her, then what was she? A mousy alternative that he was taking for a test drive? Was it the superficial dissimilarity that so attracted him to her, as if – fresh from his divorce – he wanted to try out the exact opposite for a while, just for the hell of it?