The Accidental Mother (32 page)

“Is she?” Sophie asked.

“Yes.” Izzy lifted her head and looked from Louis to Sophie. “It was Mummy that pushed me back to you, wasn’t it?

Sophie thought about the swell of the tide that had carried Izzy almost directly into her arms. She rested her palm against Izzy’s cheek and smiled down at her. “You know what,” she said, feeling suddenly comforted by childish logic. “I think you’re right.”

Louis tried halfheartedly to persuade Sophie that she didn’t have to come with him to the solicitor’s.

She pointed out as she clambered out of bed that the doctor had said they were all fine and that in fact a trip would take their minds off of it all.

It was interesting to watch Louis’s face then as he struggled with not wanting to go alone but wanting to do the right thing.

“Honestly, it’s fine,” Sophie said, finding a clean, dry top. She had undone the first two top buttons on her pajamas before she realized what she was doing, dropped the T-shirt like a hot brick, and nodded in the direction of the door. “We’ll meet you downstairs.”

Louis seemed just as embarrassed as she was by her sudden carefree impulse to undress in front him and needed no further prompting to leave, but just before he shut the door behind him, he turned around again. “You’re sure you want to come?”

“We’re sure,” Bella said. “Because if you’re going to look at houses and shops, then so are me and Izzy. You said we’d decide everything together, remember?”

Both Louis and Sophie sensed that Bella was testing him.

“Of course,” Louis said. “Of course the three of us will decide together.”

Once the door was shut, Sophie dressed herself and the girls quickly in three pairs of jeans purchased especially for the trip and three brand-new pairs of sneakers.

“I look like you!” Izzy said, pointing at Sophie, clearly delighted. “Only I don’t have a wobbly tummy.”

“Oh, Izzy,” Sophie said as she picked up her bag. “You really know how to pay a compliment.”

As Izzy and Sophie bustled out of the room, Sophie noticed that Bella was hanging back, picking at the fringe of her mum’s red mohair sweater.

“Bella? Come on,” Sophie prompted her.

“He really likes you,” Bella said. “Doesn’t he?”

“A bit, I think,” Sophie said. “And I like him too—a bit.”

“Does he like you the way he liked Mummy?” Bella questioned her closely. Worried that somehow the six-year-old had seen through her exterior to spot her feeling for Louis, Sophie reacted strongly. “God no!” she exclaimed. “I mean no. Not at all.”

Bella bit her lip and looked long and hard before she picked up her coat and walked out of the room. “Good,” she said as she passed Sophie.

A
re you sure?” Sophie asked Mrs. Alexander again as they stood in the foyer of the B & B.

Mrs. Alexander nodded vigorously. “Yes, dear,” she repeated. “Those two little mites are out like lights, the pub’s only down the road, and if they wake up I’ll phone you at this number, okay?” She brandished the Post-it note on which Sophie had written her cell phone number. “I don’t usually do babysitting, but we’re quiet, and these are extenuating circumstances. Go on, the pair of you, you look like you need a drink.”

Louis smiled warmly at their hostess—if she had been a bird, he would have charmed her from the nearest tree.

“Exactly the kind of service you get from a boutique hotel,” he said, flirting shamelessly with the middle-aged woman, which was something of an uncomfortable revelation for Sophie, who had yet to see him flirt overtly. He was exceptionally good at it.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Alexander agreed, fluttering her lashes coquettishly.

A cold gust of wind enveloped them as they stepped out onto the street, and Sophie pulled her jacket tightly around her. Without comment, Louis dropped the weight of his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into the shelter of his body. Silently they crossed the road and walked into the pub.

“What do you want?” he said, leaning against the bar.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know!” Sophie found herself wanting to cry out in despair, but instead she asked for a brandy. “Make it a large one,” she told him. “For the shock.” Only she didn’t tell him that it was the shock of having his arm around her that she needed it for, not the whole near-drowning thing.

As Louis ordered, Sophie looked around the pub; it was pretty quiet. Two old men sitting in one corner and group of quite rowdy locals another. Sophie made her way to a third corner and found a table. As she waited for Louis to deliver the brandy, she considered the way he had put his arm around her so easily.

It could have meant one of three things: he now considered them to be such close friends that he felt as comfortable with casual embraces as Cal often was. This proved that he was gay because Sophie had never yet known a straight man who did hugging just to be friendly. Or, it could mean that he knew she secretly fancied him, which she did not anyway because that would be in extremely bad taste, but for some reason he
thought
she did and figured he might have some luck. This made him an amoral philanderer—a description that until recently Sophie had thought would had fitted him perfectly but that Louis had inconsiderately messed up with his irritating bouts of sensitivity and heroism. Or, most likely, being a man, he probably didn’t anxiously overanalyze every single gesture he made and worry about its repercussions. Probably, Sophie concluded with regret, it meant nothing at all except that her crush, which she was determined to will into nothing, was getting out of hand.

“Good God,” she mumbled to herself as Louis approached the table. “I seriously need to get back to work. I’m starting to turn into Lisa.” And for a moment she missed the emotionally flat and tranquil landscape that her life had been a just over a month ago.

Louis set the drinks down on the table, and out of the four seats around it chose the chair opposite her, proving conclusively the arm thing meant nothing.

“So,” Sophie asked him, determined not to let her overtired and overly emotional brain do any more unauthorized thinking. “How did it go at the solicitor’s?”

She had to ask him because even though she, Bella, and Izzy had waited in the reception area, giving him rather loud and boisterous moral support, when he had come out from his appointment he hadn’t said a word. He’d just looked at the children with the expression of a man who had had a serious reality check.

“Let’s go” had been all he’d said, and fearing that he’d just been landed with debt, repossession, or worse, Sophie had decided not to question him further in front of the girls.

Louis looked at the top of his pint for a moment. “Weird,” he said. “It turns out that the girls and I have got quite a lot of money.”

Sophie had not been expecting that. “Really?” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” Louis said, looking equally amazed. “When we first got the mortgage, we took out an insurance policy, you know, to cover the cost of the loan and a bit more besides if one of us died. The financial adviser talked us into it. Funny really, Carrie and I weren’t exactly known for forward planning—but I think it was the baby coming. We suddenly realized we were grown-ups. But I’ve got to admit, I didn’t really know what the policy meant. I just kept paying into it, even though sometimes when money was tight we were tempted to cancel it…. It’s not like we ever thought…but for some reason, we never got round to doing it.”

Sophie listened to him talking about his life with Carrie, as a couple, a unit, and a “we” as if from a distance. Because she had not really known them as a couple, it was hard to think of them that way, even when Louis talked about their domestic arrangements. It was like there were three sets of alternate realities that had nothing to do with one another: Carrie and Louis living life quietly with their two children on the coast, Sophie’s absent vision of her friend’s life; Carrie on her own, struggling to bring up her kids after Louis abandoned her for the other side of the world; and Louis now, this half-known version of the man Sophie was becoming more attracted to at exactly the moment when she should have been holding back. Three parallel universes that Sophie somehow had to make sense of and draw together without driving herself completely mad.

“Anyway,” Louis continued, oblivious. “While I was away, I’d kept paying any money I earned from a few part-time jobs I had into our joint account. I knew Carrie didn’t want my help, but I couldn’t not do anything, so I kept paying what I had in and the payment didn’t get returned, so it made me feel better about things, I suppose.”

Sophie watched him carefully, talking about his abandonment of Carrie so casually. And yet she knew he was not a callous, careless person; she was sure of it. So she said nothing and just kept on listening.

“The joint account doesn’t amount to much,” he went on. “Just a few grand. The solicitor told me Carrie never touched it at all after I left. But the direct debit for the insurance policy went out of that account. The mortgage on the house will be cleared, and there’s nearly a hundred-thousand-pound lump sum too.”

Sophie blinked. “Fuck,” she said simply.

“I know,” Louis said. “And that’s why I feel weird. When I found out about Carrie, I was ready to come back here and fight for my girls. I was ready to buckle down and get a job, and I knew I’d have to struggle to pay the mortgage on my own but I was determined to do it because this was my chance to makes things right, do the grown-up thing.” He paused. “A big part of this was selfishness, you know. A big part of this was to make me feel better about myself. And then, almost as soon as I got back, I realized that the way I felt wasn’t important. It was all about my children, my two children. When I saw Bella’s face, I realized how I’d damaged her through my own weakness. I couldn’t stand to let her down again. But I expected it to be a struggle. I wanted it to be. Somehow having all that cash handed to me on a plate like this seems wrong, it seems really wrong to profit from Carrie’s death.” Louis struggled to say the last word of the sentence and his shifted in his seat. “So perhaps I should just give it to charity and start again. What do you think?”

Sophie blinked at him again.

“I wish you’d stop the blinking and start talking,” Louis exclaimed. “It’s freaking me out.”

“Sorry.” Sophie took a breath. “I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Louis, don’t be mad! You can’t give away the money. You and Carrie took out an insurance policy on each other’s lives. That’s all. And now Carrie’s gone, you’re entitled, more important, the
children
are entitled to the payout. It still would have paid out if you’d fallen down a volcano in Lima—”

“There aren’t any volcanoes in Lima,” Louis interrupted.

“Whatever.” Sophie held up her palm to prevent further interruptions. “My point is,
you
kept up the payments, and you and the children are benefiting because of that. Those are just the facts. But more important this is exactly what Carrie would want for her children. She’d
want
them to have some security. She’d
want
you to have some breathing space. I mean, think about it. Now you won’t have to rush into a job you’d hate, like the one at the printer’s. You can spend more time with the girls, getting to know them. Maybe you can even buy a decent camera and start taking photos again.”

Louis looked up from the table suddenly and stared at her.

“What?” she asked him, feeling disconcerted.

“How did you know I wanted to get back into photography?”

“Well, you used to run your own business, didn’t you, before Bella came and you needed a more regular income? Obvious really. No one would do a crappy job they hated if they had the chance to do something they loved.” Sophie watched Louis’s expression darken as he broke eye contact with her once again.

“Is that why you went, Louis?” she found the question rushing out of her mouth before she could censor it. “Because you felt trapped into something you didn’t want? Because you got married and had a baby before you knew it. Is that why?”

“No!” His voice rose in protest so that the other customers all looked over. “No,” he said again more quietly. He picked up his empty glass and stood. “I suppose it’s about time we talked about this. I know it still bothers you, and I want you to know the truth.” He swallowed. “You’ve been a really good…friend to me. So I’ll tell you if you really want to know.”

Sophie looked at him. Did she want to know? she asked herself. Because she felt that knowing would bring an end at last to this bubble that she had been living in, kidding herself that she was somehow vital to this fragile family. But she knew that could not be true. In reality, she needed to know exactly what Louis had done to make him leave Carrie so that she could put an end to her crush on him and move on, alone.

“I want to know,” she said.

“Okay,” Louis said, “but I need another drink first.”

A
ctually, I was happy,” Louis told her, after taking a long draft of his pint. “I was really happy before it all fell apart. I didn’t see it coming, and when it did go wrong, it just knocked me completely sideways. I couldn’t handle it.

“Everyone said we were doomed to failure, Carrie’s mum—obviously—but all of our friends too, even if they were only joking. I don’t think from what Carrie said you were that impressed either, were you?”

Sophie considered denying it, but instead she just shrugged. “It did happen very fast,” she said.

“I know, but I thought then—and I still feel, even after everything that happened—that just because something happens very fast, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s wrong. Sometimes spontaneity is good.” Louis waited for a moment, as if he expected her to offer an opinion. When she remained silent, he began talking again.

“We did get together quickly, and Carrie was a bit of a force of nature that was hard to resist—but I didn’t want to resist her! When a beautiful, funny, talented woman says she wants you, you don’t stop to think about how fast it’s going and where it might lead, not when it all feels so good.”

Sophie shrugged again. It seemed an appropriately comprehensive reaction to give when she was so unsure of how she really felt.

“And it did feel good. As far as I was concerned, it
was
love. And when Carrie became pregnant, it wasn’t a trap—it couldn’t have been because I was incredibly pleased. I never knew my dad, and Mum—well, she wasn’t exactly the perfect mother. My nan brought me up. And she was wonderful, really wonderful, but I missed all that other family stuff that my mates had. Anyway, Nan died when I was seventeen, and from then on, although I had a lot of good friends, I had no family. Until I met Carrie, and then she and the baby she was carrying became my family. Carrie didn’t trap me, there was this one night on the beach when…” Louis trailed off, a faint smile on his face, lost in his memories.

Sophie sat quietly, feeling sick with jealousy and guilt.

“I loved Carrie,” he continued, “she was my first love. I would have married her with or without the baby. I was going to ask her anyway when we’d been together for a year. I’d more or less decided that I would the day after I first met her. But when she told me about Bella, it just came out. I proposed and she said yes and that was it. When I think about that now, I do wonder if Bella hadn’t happened, another six or seven months down the line if we would have still been so in love. But Bella did happen, and I’m glad she did. I don’t regret anything. It was a truly happy time.”

Sophie thought of the photo of Carrie on the beach with Louis in the background, his arms about another woman, probably flirting with her the way he had with Mrs. Alexander earlier.

“Louis, can I ask you something?” she said.

He nodded, lifting his chin a little as if he expected she might want to punch it. “Were you seeing other women after you were married?” Sophie delivered her blow with swift efficiency.

Louis did not flinch. He held her gaze and shook his head. “No,” he said, and he smiled to himself. “Carrie used to say that I was a terrible flirt, but honestly I couldn’t see it. I’m just nice to people, and if that’s flirting then I flirt with everyone, men included.”

Sophie thought about this for a moment. No one could say she was a world expert on the matter, but she was more or less certain he had never flirted with her.

“Except for a person I’m really attracted to,” Louis said, “then I sort of clam up.” He stopped himself, and an uncomfortable silence hung between them for a beat.

Again Sophie sensed he was expecting her to say something. Again she discovered not only could she not think of any response apart from shrieking hysterically “You’ve never flirted with me!” but also she was sure that even if she had tried to speak, her mouth would not have opened. She was scared rigid. Too scared to think about what he might or might not be about to tell her. What he might be trying to say.

“I never cheated on Carrie,” Louis continued. “Why would I? Carrie was radiant, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Even more when she was pregnant and after Bella was born. She was like a sunrise that got more spectacular every morning. I loved her, Sophie, probably too much. When I look back on it, I think it was almost adolescent. I’d never had a proper girlfriend before Carrie.”

“You must have!” Sophie blurted out incredulous, her rebellious tongue probably loosened by an uncomfortable tide of jealousy that rose in her chest as Louis talked about Carrie.

He arched an eyebrow, and a hint of a smile hovered around his lips. “Why?” he asked her inevitably.

“Well, you were twenty-three or twenty-four when you met Carrie,” she said, conveniently forgetting that she herself had only ever had one proper boyfriend, and that hadn’t been until she was pushing twenty-seven.

“There were girls,” Louis said, “but no one I connected with emotionally. That’s why when it happened I think I poured so much into it. Maybe too much. You know, I actually think it was my commitment that scared Carrie. All I could see in my future was her and Bella—our family. All she could see was the same thing, and I think seeing that blotted out all of the hopes and possibilities she’d cherished for so long. I think in the end she felt she’d rushed into it.”

Sophie let that piece of information sink in. “Are you saying Carrie ended the marriage?” she asked in disbelief. “But she always said you were so happy, even after you’d split up, she told me you were happy!”

Louis shrugged. “Well, Carrie really hated to be wrong,” he said.

Sophie wondered if her friend’s stubborn streak and phobia of people crowing “I told you so!” was really a good enough reason for her not to have mentioned the split to her best friend. And then another thought occurred to her. Perhaps their friendship hadn’t just drifted after the christening. Perhaps Carrie had deliberately begun to cut the ties. It would have been easy to do, as Sophie hardly bothered to maintain them herself. Perhaps she hadn’t ever been a really good friend to Carrie. And what use was it, she wondered, being loyal and steadfast to a friend who had gone forever? Sophie had just started to allow herself to feel proud of her rescue job on this family, but in fact, if she had still been the kind of friend who exchanged vows and promises before Carrie had been killed, then Louis wouldn’t have been sitting here telling her everything now. She would already have known.

Sophie dropped her head in shame. She had let her down in life, and now she was secretly lusting after her husband, who clearly still loved Carrie despite all that had passed.

That’s it, Sophie told herself silently. The stupidity ends here.

“So,” she said stiffly to Louis. “What went wrong?”

He scrutinized her for a moment, probably taking her change in attitude as disapproval, which Sophie didn’t mind at all.

“We didn’t have much money,” he continued. “And both of us working meant that Bella was in the nursery full-time. Neither of us got to spend as much time with her as we wanted. Carrie had stopped painting. I hadn’t been near my camera in months. I could see she was finding it all a bit of a grind, the daily routine was wearing her down. So I decided to take more shifts at the printer’s. Carrie gave up her shop job. She started painting again, and we cut Bella’s hours down at the nursery so she and Carrie could be together more. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t seem like a sacrifice. I thought I was doing the right thing for my family, and that made me feel pretty good.

“But Carrie and I hardly saw each other, and when we did I was almost always exhausted. Day by day we lost little pieces of the intimacy that had bonded us together.”

Louis paused and took a deep draft of his beer. Sophie followed suit with her brandy, feeling it burn the back of her throat. She wanted to know everything, but the thought of knowing terrified her. She took another sip.

“Then I got in one night, after about two months of me working late, and she was waiting up for me. She said she had some great news that might mean she’d be earning again. This new artist’s studio and gallery was opening in town, for local artists only. He was Welsh, but he was looking for two or three other artists to work there too. She’d met him at a friend’s house. This bloke called Tony Something. He really liked her work, wanted her to paint in the gallery. She was thrilled, really thrilled, she was so happy, and it was only when I saw her standing there glowing that I realized she hadn’t been happy for months. And then she got pregnant again.” A shadow of pain passed across Louis’s face, and Sophie’s chest tightened.

“At first I couldn’t understand when she told me why she was so…reserved. She couldn’t look at me. I thought maybe she was worried that we couldn’t afford a new baby, so I tried to reassure her, told her we’d manage somehow, and she burst into tears.”

“I’m so sorry, Louis,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And then she said, “I don’t think I love you anymore.” Louis was no longer looking at Sophie; instead he seemed to be scrutinizing the pub’s stone floor as he recounted the memory.

“She said she’d fallen in love with this other man, this Tony, the gallery owner. She said they had been sleeping together for a couple of months. That it was really special. She said she didn’t think the baby could be mine because there’d only been this one time in weeks.”

“She didn’t tell me any of this,” Sophie said, shocked. “I used to think that we were so close. That’s why I took the girls, because of how close we’d been—always, forever, whatever. That was what we always said. But I must have been wrong. Carrie must have felt that our friendship was over.”

Louis shook his head. “I don’t think so. Carrie used to talk about you all this time. She was always wishing we had the time or money to see you. If things had worked out with Tony, she’d have told you, I’m sure she would have. But they didn’t. And Carrie’s dreams were so important to her, and living them for real even more so. It was a matter of pride. I don’t think she could bear to see them go wrong, but she would especially hate for other people to see them fall apart.”

Sophie’s eyes met Louis’s, and part of her wished fervently that he was lying, that he was making all of this up to look good, so she could hate him and that would be that. But she could see that he wasn’t. Not even the most accomplished con artist could lie with his entire body. Every muscle, every angle of Louis’s body, each successive expression on his face told her that he was telling her the truth, a truth that was clearly painful for him as well as for her.

“So she kicked you out?” Sophie asked. “But then how do you know about what happened with Tony?”

Louis took a deep breath and finished the last of his pint. “No, she didn’t kick me out. Like I said, the way I loved her was so fierce. I’d invested all of my longing for a proper, stable family into her. The way I reacted was pathetic, childish. I should have stayed, I should have tried to talk things through, but I just went blind with hurt and rage. I went upstairs, I took my passport, my credit card, shoved some clothes into a bag, and I left with no idea where I was going.”

Louis paused, the corners of his mouth pulled taut. He passed the back of his hand roughly across his eyes. “The shouting had woken Bella up. She was crying in her bed, calling out to me, asking me to pick her up. I just walked straight past her. If there was one thing that I still wish I could change, it would be that moment. Over and over again I’ve woken up wishing that I had gone back to her. That I had picked her up and held her. It’s the biggest regret of my life.”

Sophie wanted to reach out, to put a hand on his arm, but before she could, he seemed to pull himself together, withdrawing his hands from the table and sitting upright in his chair.

“Carrie didn’t want me to go,” he continued. “She wanted me to stay and talk, but I had to get out of there. I felt like my perfect life, everything I’d worked so hard to create was ruined. I was like a child who wants to throw away a broken toy. I couldn’t even look at her. I just walked out. I didn’t even kiss Bella good-bye. The next twenty-four hours were like a nightmare. I can hardly remember them. But I got a train to London and another train to Heathrow. And I got the first standby flight to the States I could get on. Malibu!” Louis’s laugh was empty of any pleasure. “It was ironic, because I’d always wanted to go there, before I met Carrie.”

He studied Sophie’s face. “What are you thinking?” he asked her. “Do you hate me again?”

Sophie shook her head slowly, wishing desperately that she did, because it would make her life so much easier. “I can understand you walking out, but just leaving behind your whole life? That’s pretty hard to get my head around,” she told him honestly.

“She
was
my life, my whole life. I felt that if I didn’t have her, I didn’t have anything. And before you ask, I didn’t even think about Bella at that point. I didn’t think about much at all except Carrie with the other man and—I think I wanted to show her I could be as selfish as she could. I think I wanted to shock her into wanting me back.”

Louis took a deep breath. “I was a fool,” he said, and it was his turn to shrug. “I lived off my credit card for a while, got drunk a lot.” He grimaced. “Generally acted like an idiot.”

Sophie guessed she was only now about to find out the extent of his folly.

“And then about a month after I arrived, I woke up one morning somehow sober, and I realized what I’d done to myself and to Bella. By trying to punish Carrie, I’d punished myself and my little girl. I’d got it all wrong.