Seeing Other People (8 page)

Lunch over, I asked for the bill. Penny had an afternoon of meetings ahead of her as did I; still, it was good to have had the opportunity to have a conversation with her that wasn’t constantly interrupted by our kids and their seemingly never-ending stream of questions.

Penny put on her jacket wearing a look that bordered on shy as though she was embarrassed by the depth of her feelings for me. I felt it too. The giddiness of feelings of first love tempered by the realisation that we’d been together for over twenty years.

‘This has been so good, don’t you think?’ said Penny. ‘We should definitely do this more often.’

‘Absolutely, I was thinking—’ Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Angela Towney, a former staffer at the
Correspondent
,
now
arts editor
of
the
Review
,
heading towards our table. But that wasn’t what had shut me up so abruptly. What had silenced me was that Angela wasn’t alone. Trailing behind her, looking as horrified by the events that were unfolding as me, was Bella
.

7

Bella.

I hadn’t spoken to her since that day outside the office when she’d returned my watch. And just as I had made it my aim to have nothing whatsoever to do with her, each time our paths crossed at work she looked right through me as though I didn’t exist. With every other person she was her usual charming, funny, self, but with me there was nothing. Not hatred, not bitterness, or discomfort. Nothing. It was as though she had permanently erased all memory of our time together.

After a few weeks of this I simply stopped seeing her around the office at all. At first I thought perhaps she was ill because her internship wasn’t due to end for another two months but then curiosity finally got the better of me and I inquired about her at the arts desk to be told that she’d quit the internship for personal reasons. For a while I’d thought about calling her and finding out if she was OK but knew I couldn’t afford to do even that without risking everything I’d achieved in the past few months with my relationship with Penny.

Angela greeted me with an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek. ‘Joe! Long time no see! How are you?’

‘I’m good thanks. You look great.’

Angela laughed. ‘I do, don’t I?’ She turned to Bella. ‘Let me introduce you to Bella, our new junior at the
Review
. She started last week and is a real star. She actually did part of an internship at your place though I don’t suppose you remember her. You never could stand mixing with the interns.’

Were we friends or complete strangers? I looked at Bella, wondering how best to play it. She beat me to it though.

‘Pleased to meet you, Joe,’ she said, shaking my hand. ‘Angela’s told me a lot about you.’

I needed to take control of the conversation. I couldn’t afford to let it roam wild and free given its potential to ruin my life. ‘It’s nice to meet you too. Let me introduce you to my wife, Penny.’

There, I’d said it. It was done. Now Bella would know that the woman with me wasn’t a colleague, an interviewee or a PR who I was trying to sweet-talk into doing me a favour.

Penny shook Angela’s hand and then Bella’s. As their skin touched my stomach knotted so tightly I had to brace myself against the table to stop from doubling over. This was my worst nightmare playing out before my eyes. This was everything I never wanted to see happening right in front of me in 3-D complete with Dolby 7.1 Stereo.

‘I can’t believe I’ve never met you before now,’ said Angela gleefully. ‘I sat at the desk opposite Joe’s for three years, taught him everything he knows!’

I laughed, determined to maintain the illusion of normality. ‘You wish! She basically forced me to make her coffee every day.’

‘And he couldn’t even do that very well!’

Penny laughed and addressed Bella. ‘You must be thrilled to be at the
Review
after all that interning. It’s a great first job.’

Angela, who was never short of a surplus of words, answered for her. ‘She’s over the moon, aren’t you?’

‘I couldn’t be happier,’ said Bella. She coughed nervously. ‘Really I couldn’t.’

My blood was pounding in my ears and I felt like I was going to throw up. Desperate though I was for this to be over I knew that it required a little more small talk to sound anywhere near convincing. ‘So how are you, Angela? Keeping well?’

‘As well as can be expected these days. We’ve been understaffed for months now and the only reason they let me hire a junior was because I told them I was going to leave if they didn’t.’

Bella cleared her throat politely. ‘I’m so sorry about this but I’ve just remembered I need to return quite an important call.’ She shook Penny’s hand again. ‘So lovely to meet you, Mrs Clarke.’ Then she turned to me and shook mine without meeting my gaze, ‘And lovely to meet you too, Joe. Take care.’

With Bella gone there was an instant drop in pressure inside my skull. I no longer felt like I was going to burst a blood vessel. Although Angela chatted on in a bid to update me on all the industry gossip, I soon stopped listening to a word she was saying. All I could think was how horrific it was that Penny had just met Bella. I stole a look at Penny. Surely she hadn’t guessed anything? I was pretty sure I’d kept my cool and Bella had barely said a word. Penny was listening to Angela, nodding and smiling in all the right places. Everything was fine. The danger had passed.

Angela concluded the conversation by coaxing me into promising to meet up with her at some unspecified point in the future for lunch. It would never happen, of course. As much as Angela and I had got on well together, I was pretty sure we didn’t have much to say to each other now that we were at different papers. Still it was nice to pretend if only to distract myself from the enormity of Penny meeting Bella.

As Angela took her leave and made her way over to her table the waitress arrived with our bill. Once we had paid I watched as Penny casually glanced over at the table where Bella was sitting down opposite Angela.

‘Well, they were nice, weren’t they?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, they were.’

‘What was the younger one’s name again?’

‘Bella.’

‘And she was an intern at the
Correspondent
?’

‘Apparently.’

‘She’s very pretty.’

‘Is she? Can’t say I’ve given it much thought.’

‘Mind you, so is that other woman, Angela. How long did you work with her again?’

‘Three years, give or take.’

‘She’s a bit of a force of nature isn’t she?’

I shrugged. ‘To me she was always just Angela. But yeah, now you say it, “a force of nature” is a good way to describe her.’

Penny picked up her bag from the back of the chair. ‘I suppose we’d better be getting off.’

As we made our way across the café towards the exit, I attempted to engage Penny in conversation, refusing to look anywhere near Angela and Bella’s table. On the way out Penny stopped at the door to wave in the women’s direction, forcing me to join in too. My gaze met Bella’s for a brief instant but there was no hint of recognition on her face. I was just another guy and this was just another day.

Outside I took Penny’s hand in mine and told her I’d walk her to Liverpool Street. I tried making conversation on the way but she seemed lost in thought, only offering half-hearted responses to my questions. I asked her if she was OK and she offered me a half smile.

‘I’m probably just tired, that’s all,’ she replied. ‘Still, I finish early today so it’s not too bad.’ For a moment her face wore an expression that I couldn’t quite discern. Was she upset? Was she mulling something over? I couldn’t tell. Then all at once it disappeared. ‘Don’t forget the recital’s at seven,’ she continued. ‘Jack’s told all his friends that his journalist daddy’s coming and will probably be writing a review.’

As her train arrived to take her back into central London we kissed goodbye but it felt cold and perfunctory, compared to the kiss with which she had greeted me outside Allegro’s. Should I ask her one last time if everything was all right? It seemed like a good idea but before I’d even formed the question she had hopped on the train and taken her seat. As the train doors closed I stood waving goodbye but she didn’t look up once. It was as though she was lost in another world.

Through no fault of my own I ended up being late for the recital. And by late I don’t mean coming in halfway through the evening but rather having missed the entire thing – Jack’s recorder solo, Rosie’s group violin performance and everything in between.

Penny face was like thunder as she spotted me dodging through the hall full of proud parents gathering together their offspring. This wasn’t going to be an easy sell at all.

‘You wouldn’t believe it, Pen; everything that could go wrong did go wrong. My meeting with Camilla took the whole afternoon and then she wanted me to prepare our efforts for a meeting first thing in the morning with the bigwigs upstairs, and once I’d finished that it was gone six and I still had a rewrite to do on some copy that was long past its deadline and then I was stuck on a tube for forty minutes because of an “incident” on the line. Every time I tried to call I had no signal. It was a total nightmare. How did the kids get on?’

Penny didn’t say a word. Instead she gestured towards the front of the room where Jack and one of his friends were jumping on and off the stairs at the side of the stage. I scanned the room for Rosie and finally spotted her at the back of the hall talking with her friend Amelie.

I called over to Jack and he came running over dangling his recorder from his fingers. ‘Why weren’t you here, Daddy? Mum said you promised you’d come. Isn’t it bad to break promises?’

I knelt down and gave Jack the biggest hug in my repertoire. ‘It’s the absolute worst thing you can do but sometimes these things are just out of your hands. I tried really hard to get here but I couldn’t. You forgive me though, don’t you?’

Jack’s face lit up. Was there ever a better present for a child than the opportunity to tell off a parent? He adopted his sternest expression: it was adorable. ‘Do you promise not to do it again?’

I held up my hand and crossed my heart. ‘Never again.’

‘Then I forgive you.’

Hand in hand we made our way over to Rosie who had just finished saying goodbye to her friend.

‘I’m sorry I was late, Rosie. A whole bunch of stuff got in the way. Do you forgive me?’

Rosie shrugged. ‘You didn’t miss much anyway. Jack got nervous and kept playing the wrong notes. Everyone thought it was hilarious.’

I glared a first and final warning in Rosie’s direction as Jack’s face crumpled in sadness. ‘Rosie, you know better than that. Apologise to your brother.’

She rolled her eyes for both Jack’s benefit and mine. ‘Fine! Jack, I’m sorry, OK?’

It sounded more like a threat than an apology and Rosie knew it. I glanced at Penny, who had come over to join us, hoping that she might jump in and say something, but she didn’t. It was as though she’d decided to take the role of an impartial observer. Was she really so angry with me for being late? Or was this to do with something else?

Out of earshot the children gathered their instruments and so I took the opportunity to gauge her mood. ‘Are we OK?’

A thin-lipped silence then she turned her back on me, picked up the kids’ bags from the chair in front of her and left the room.

Any hope that Penny’s mood might have lightened once we reached home evaporated the moment she got out of the car – having not said a word the entire journey home – and made her way inside the house without looking back. Even Jack, who had never been great at reading people’s emotions, was prompted to ask if Mummy was all right. I told him she was just tired and he nodded solemnly as though he understood.

I took responsibility for the bedtime regime while Penny cleared the kitchen noisily. Left to his own devices Jack could easily take a good hour and a half to get ready for bed with a long shower, full-scale search of his room for missing pyjamas and several trips to the bathroom. I managed the lot, bedtime stories included, in forty-five minutes – which given that I was wild with tiredness myself was no mean feat.

On the way downstairs I passed Rosie’s room; thankfully as a ten year old she pretty much put herself to bed these days. She was sitting on her bed in her pyjamas and dressing gown playing with her iPod.

‘So what are you doing now? Are you staying up here or coming down for a bit?’

She momentarily lifted her eyes from the screen. ‘Staying put. Are you in trouble with Mum because you were late?’

I couldn’t help but smile; sometimes I loved how black and white my kids’ worlds were. ‘No one’s in trouble with anyone. Mum’s just tired and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep a low profile and get to bed tonight without any fuss.’ I kissed the top of her head. ‘Lights out by nine o’clock at the latest and I mean it.’

Downstairs I paused in front of the kitchen door, wondering what tack to take with Penny. Should I ask her outright what the problem was or wait patiently and hope she’d tell me in her own time? In the end I decided to play it by ear and entered the kitchen to find her sitting at the table. My eyes flicked from the half-empty bottle of Malbec in front of her to the full glass she held to her lips.