The Fallout (8 page)

Lucie, age seven

Yesterday it was my birthday. Daddy gave me a bike with pink glittery streamers on the handlebars and it has training wheels, but I mustn't worry about them because soon I'll be able to ride it and they'll be off quick as a flash. Mummy didn't come downstairs and Daddy said she's tired but I know it's because of Eloise. Sometimes I hate Eloise but I can't say that because it's Bad. I went creeping upstairs to see Mummy even though Daddy said I shouldn't. She was lying in her bed like a princess with her hair all around the pillow but when she saw me she told me to go out because she couldn't bear the sight of me. It's because I had that bad thought about Eloise. Mummy knows. She knows everything.

Chapter 7

“I'm going to give her whatever she wants. Anything. I know that scene last night was hideous and she hates my guts at the moment, but she adores September just as much as I do. Once she calms down a bit she'll want to do what's best for her.”

“Like having two parents living together? That'd be best, wouldn't it? Isn't that what all the studies say?”

Dan frowned over the top of his strawberry-and-passion-fruit smoothie.

“Not helpful, Josh, man.”

“Sorry.”

Josh wished he didn't feel quite so awkward. They were in the café at Dan's fancy gym in the shadow of Alexandra Palace and, as always, Josh felt like he was being judged. It wasn't that he was in bad shape exactly, but compared to Dan and the other guys in there, he felt flabby and underdefined. It wasn't his fault they didn't have extra money lying around to spend on a membership and state-of-the-art Lycra workout gear. And yes, he supposed he could do as Hannah was always suggesting and go running or cycle to work or whatever, but she had no real clue how much teaching took out of a person. People always assumed it was a sedentary, physically undemanding job, but he was always on his feet to illustrate a point, or pacing around the classroom looking at individual students' work. And there was psychological stress. It'd take more than a few chin-ups on one of those fancy weight machines or twenty minutes in the steam room to sort out the knots in his brain after eight hours of teaching.

“Look—” Dan put on his sincere face, just as obviously as if he was pulling on a hat “—I don't know how many times I can apologize for last night. I know I made you and Hannah a promise, and I broke it. I feel like I abused your hospitality. But, hand on heart, it was the first time Sienna and I met up. I just had to see her.”

“So it's serious, then?”

Dan's face slackened and he cast his eyes downward, looking for a moment like a love-struck teenager. “We have...strong feelings for each other.”

“Right. So that was all bullshit then, that stuff about Sasha not having to know about you and Sienna because it was so new and it could go nowhere?”

Dan looked as close to shamefaced as he ever got.

“I just wanted to keep her out of it. I was being protective, I suppose.”

“Protective of whom? Your wife or your mistress?”

Dan glared at him. Clearly the word
mistress
grated. Well, good. Dan was so infuriatingly sure of himself, always bending the truth until it fit in with the image he'd created of himself in his own head. He needed to see how this looked from the outside, just how grubby the whole thing was.

“Hey, Dan.” The woman who stood by the table was the color of a newly minted penny and dressed in head-to-toe electric blue spandex, her highlighted blond hair pulled back into a high ponytail. “You coming to circuit training later?”

At first Josh had taken her to be in her late twenties, but closer inspection put her more in her midforties, the fine lines next to her eyes and the crepey swell of her unavoidable cleavage giving her away. He watched, impressed despite himself, as Dan slipped effortlessly into flirty mode.

“Not today, doll. Things to do, people to see. You know how it is.”

She shrugged prettily.

“Well, you'd better make it next week. We can't have you going to seed now, can we? Not after all your hard work.”

Even though she was looking at Dan, Josh couldn't shake off the feeling that she was referring to him when she said that thing about “going to seed.” It was always like this when he went out with Dan, that feeling of suffering from comparison.

“Doll?” Josh inquired, as the woman moved off, ponytail swinging behind her.

Dan smirked. “I'm using it in a post-ironic way, naturally.”

“Of course you are. So go on. Back to your
mistress.
I don't suppose you slept at her place last night?”

Dan pressed his lips together.

“No offence, but I think the less you and Hannah know about where I am, the better. I don't want to put you two in an awkward position.”

“It's a bit late for that! So you are with her, then?”

“I didn't say that. I just think it's best Sasha doesn't know where I am at the moment, and if I tell you you'll either feel obliged to tell her, or you'll feel bad about not telling her. Either way it's shit.”

Josh had to agree it was shit.

“I still can't believe you're splitting up. I always thought you were so together, you and Sasha. All those ‘I love you's.'”

“Yeah, well. That was Sasha's doing, really. She's very needy, emotionally, if you know what I mean. If I texted her and didn't include a kiss or a ‘love you,' she'd act like it was the end of the fucking world.”

“Aren't you worried, then, about what this is going to do to her?”

Dan shook his head.

“Underneath the neediness and that fragile ‘touch me and I'll break' exterior, Sasha has a rod of steel running through her—I'm not even joking. She's the hardest person I know.”

Seeing Josh's expression, he held up his hand defensively.

“That's not a criticism. I'm still really fond of Sasha.”

“Fond? She's your wife, for God's sake, not your granny!”

The whole conversation was making Josh feel uncomfortable. How was it possible to go from love to fond in just two weeks? And if it could happen to Dan and Sasha, couldn't it also happen to him and Hannah?

“She's not going to be my wife for too much longer,” Dan pointed out matter-of-factly.

“You've already seen a lawyer?”

“No. Of course I haven't. We don't need lawyers, Josh. It's not going to be that sort of breakup. I'm not out to shaft Sasha. She's the mother of my daughter, for fuck's sake. I'm going to be more than generous. She can have half the money from the house, even though I put up most of the deposit and have paid the entire mortgage and every single bill since we got it. If we split the equity, she'll have more than enough to buy a two-bedroom garden flat in the same area, on the same street, even. Something like you've got, only a bit flashier, if you know what I mean.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn't mean it like that. It's just—you know what Sasha's like, everything has to be perfect. Then I could buy my own place nearby so that when September's a bit older, she can walk between the two. I was even thinking I might get something near that new secondary school, so that she'd definitely be in the catchment.”

“Dan, they're not even at primary school yet. Anyway, you know Sasha will insist on private school.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. I just want you to see I'm thinking long term about this.”

“And what about custody?”

Dan looked blank.

“Of September. Are you going to ask for half and half?”

Josh took a savage enjoyment from the expression of horror that passed momentarily across Dan's face.

“Well, that wouldn't make any sense, would it, seeing as I'm the one who has to go out to work to fund everything? No, I think it'll be a much less formal arrangement—when I'm not working I'll have September 24/7, other times less. We'll have to come to some sort of flexible agreement.”

“Good luck with that.”

Dan sighed deeply and rubbed a hand across his eyes. The whites were pinkish in the corners, which Josh had first attributed to Dan being fresh from fifty lengths of the gym's pool, but now he wondered if it might just be stress. Dan was putting up a good front, but it couldn't be easy, breaking up a family. Josh wondered how much he was sleeping—with or without the added complication of a twenty-four-year-old model in his bed. The sudden mental image that accompanied this thought left him feeling momentarily hot with guilt.

“Look, I know this initial bit is going to be difficult,” said Dan, still rubbing his eyes. “Sasha's furious and she has every right to be. I've been a fucking jerk. But once she realizes it really is over, and I'm not about to be a complete bastard about money and stuff, she'll have to accept it, won't she?”

“Whatever you say.”

Chapter 8

“I want the house, full custody of our daughter, of course, and at least half his earnings—his
real
earnings, mind. Not what he admits to the taxman.”

“I was asking for the bottom line of what you'd be prepared to accept, Mrs. Fisher.”

“That is the bottom line.”

Sasha was dressed in full executive gear—fitted black jacket, black trousers and soft black high-heeled suede boots—and was clearly not about to be cowed by either the lawyer, with her silk shirt and thick-framed Prada glasses, or by the plush wood-paneled office in High Holborn.

“I can see why you'd be tempted to go for the jugular, Mrs. Fisher, but in cases like this a certain degree of compromise is inevitable. If you could just indicate in which areas you're prepared to be flexible, I—”

“No compromises.”

Hannah winced. This was what she'd been afraid of when Sasha asked her to accompany her to her first meeting with the highly recommended Caroline Briscoe. They'd been having tea, and when Sasha casually mentioned the divorce lawyer's hourly fee, Hannah had nearly spat out her digestive biscuit.

“Couldn't you have found someone cheaper? Was David Beckham busy?”

“What do I care? I won't be paying for it.”

Useless to point out that even if the money came from Dan it was still part of the same pot she'd be relying on to live. Now Sasha was glaring at Caroline Briscoe with unblinking intensity and it was the hardened lawyer who looked away first.

“Very well, Mrs. Fisher. In that case you're going to need to give me everything you have on your husband—every annoying thing he did, every argument, every grievance. Did he spank your daughter? Was he unreasonably possessive? Was he tight with money? Were you frightened of his moods?”

Hannah couldn't help herself, and exclaimed, “Dan's not like that.”

Instantly Sasha swung around, her face contorted.

“Shut up, Hannah. You know nothing about our life together. You don't know what he was really like, when no one else was around. You don't know how he treated me.”

Hannah stared at her friend, her mouth still open on the words she had been about to say. She knew Sasha was angry. She had the right to be angry. But surely she wasn't going to start making things up about Dan? Her stomach lurched as another possibility occurred to her. Could there be a chance she wasn't making it up? Might there be a side to Dan she and Josh had never seen? The thought brought a lump of anxiety to her throat.

“And what about custody? The usual arrangement in cases like this is every other weekend and one night during the week.”

Caroline Briscoe had taken a black moleskin notepad out of the top drawer of her imposing desk and was jotting things down with an expensive-looking pen. Hannah noticed that her nails, with their clear polish, were impeccably shaped, with perfect white crescents at the base, as if she'd come straight from having a manicure. Her heart sank. How was it possible to be a top lawyer with all the work pressures that entailed, and still have time to stay groomed? Hannah barely had time to shower these days—how did other women manage it?

“I'd only allow that on the condition
she
won't be there. That bitch is not coming anywhere near my child.”

“That's something you could agree on privately with your husband, Mrs. Fisher. It's not anything that would become part of a legal contract. Unless of course you have reason to believe this woman would present a threat to your daughter's well-being in some way.”

“She's breaking up her fucking family. Don't you think that might present some threat to my daughter's well-being?”

Hannah felt her face burning, although why she should be embarrassed by her friend's behavior, she couldn't have said. It was always the same, guilt tugging like a muscle cramp inside her. “It's not your fault,” Josh was always reminding her if friends had a dud meal at a restaurant she'd recommended, or the supermarket delivery van couldn't find a parking space on their street.

Hannah would never know if she'd have been this way anyway, regardless of what had happened when she was seventeen—taking responsibility for things that weren't her fault, feeling bad for people she'd never met or for situations totally outside of her control. Like Sasha being rude to the lawyer she was overpaying to take her husband to the cleaners. That was the actual phrase she'd used, seemingly unaware it sounded like a line from a bad Hollywood film.

Afterward, Sasha insisted on going out for lunch.

“How often do we do this?” she asked when Hannah muttered about having work to do. “How often do we go to town and enjoy ourselves?”

She had a new way of talking at the moment—high and bright, as if someone had shellacked her real voice. Hannah alternated between sympathy and exasperation. Sasha seemed so alone. She hardly spoke to any of her family—not surprising in light of all the murky secrets that surrounded them. For someone with hundreds of acquaintances, she seemed in the end to have very few real friends.

“What a surprise,” Josh said dryly when she'd pointed it out over dinner the night before.

They'd argued then, about Hannah accompanying Sasha to the lawyer.

“It's taking sides. We're supposed to be neutral.”

“I'm just going to support my friend. I won't be taking part in any discussions. I'd do the same for Dan.”

“Yeah, well, Dan doesn't seem to think he'll need a lawyer. He thinks they can sort it all out like reasonable people.”

Hannah had made a snorting noise.

Now she and Sasha sat in an upmarket noodle bar in a part of the East End that had been practically a no-go zone when Hannah first moved to London, but was now achingly trendy. How quickly things changed. The noodle bar was part of a converted warehouse building with soaring ceilings painted white and supported by giant steel beams. They sat on high chrome stools, from which Hannah's legs dangled weightlessly, and ate at a white counter that ran the length of the huge plateglass window.

“He isn't going to know what hit him,” Sasha said, with unconcealed relish.

Hannah wasn't keen on the slightly fanatical look in her friend's feline eyes, but she tried to ignore it.

“If he thinks I'm just going to roll over and accept whatever crumbs he deigns to throw me, he's got another think coming.”

Hannah nodded. They'd had this conversation so many times she was getting sick of it. Anyway, she'd long since realized that Sasha wasn't actually expecting her to contribute anything to it.

“If you knew what Dan was really like, you'd run the other way.”

Sasha was waving her chopsticks around in the air like castanets. Hannah noticed she had hardly touched her stir-fry, for all the fuss she'd made sending it back because the first one contained coriander. (Hannah's face had burned, eyes glued to the table, unable to look at the poor young waitress as Sasha berated her about the wording on the menu.)

“I've already told you, Sash. I don't want to know. All of us have done things we're not particularly proud of in our lives.”

“Not like this.”

“Oh, I wouldn't be so sure.”

“Really? So you're a wifebeater, are you, Hannah?”

Hannah looked up.

“What do you mean?”

“Domestic violence. What's the matter? You don't think Dan's the type? Haven't you seen all those campaigns—you can never tell what goes on behind closed doors.”

“I don't believe you. He wouldn't.”

“Wouldn't he? Would you like to read my medical files?”

Hannah felt sick. She knew—of course she did—that you could never judge a relationship from the outside. She'd researched enough articles over the years where people had turned out to be hiding secrets—child abuse, bigamy, cross-dressing. You name it. People were rarely what they seemed. But this? Dan? She just couldn't—wouldn't—believe it.

“When? Why didn't you do something about it in that case? Why did you stay with him?”

Sasha pushed her largely untouched bowl aside crossly.

“I don't want to talk about it. I just thought you ought to know, before you start defending him. Just remember, you don't know the half of it.”

* * *

“She's making it up.”

Josh swiveled around on the bench until he was facing Hannah. She registered for the first time the lines around his soft, greeny-brown eyes—puddle-colored, she used to tease him. When had they appeared? Had they sprung up overnight, or was it just that she hadn't noticed them before? She remembered a time when she would study his face for hours as if trying to commit it to memory, every mole, every gentle hollow, the faint scars from a long-ago bout of chicken pox. But lots of people in long relationships got out of the habit of seeing each other properly. There was nothing sinister about it. She just hadn't imagined it would happen to them, that's all.

“Dan has many faults, but he's not a wifebeater. That's absurd.”

“Shh!”

Even though Lily was on the monkey bars a short distance from the park bench where they were sitting with a fed-up Toby tied up on his lead, Hannah still worried that she might hear something. And this was definitely one conversation she didn't want her daughter to repeat. She'd got Josh to meet them at the park on his way home from work just so that they could chat privately while Lily was preoccupied, but their daughter had a habit of picking up on things, even when you thought she wasn't within earshot.

“I know it's absurd. That's what I said to her. Then she said something about showing me her medical records. She says her doctor measured her bruises and photographed them. Would she make that up?”

“She's hurt, that's all. And so she's getting back at Dan any way she can. What's that phrase my mother uses? ‘Hurt people hurt people.'”

“Mummy! Look at me!”

Lily was standing near the top of the climbing structure, gripping tightly to the bars, her still-chubby legs stiffly rooted to the spot.

“Wow, Lily-put. You're so high! Be careful up there!”

Hannah turned back to Josh.

“You have to talk to him.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you're his friend. You have to let him know what's being said about him.”

“What, I'm just supposed to sit down over a pint and say ‘By the way, mate, your wife says you hit her.'”

“Don't be so facetious. But yes, you have to tell him straight.”

“I can't. No way. I couldn't accuse him of that.”

“You're not accusing him, you're just letting him know what Sasha said. You're warning him, that's all.”

“Uh-uh. Not doing it. He'll find out soon enough without me sticking my nose into it. Ever hear the phrase ‘shooting the messenger'? No way am I getting mixed up in this.”

Hannah glared at him. There were times she could find Josh's emotional awkwardness endearing, but this was not one of them.

“I don't believe you,” she said hotly. “What kind of friend are you?”

“The kind that wants to stay friends.”

Josh had turned so he was resolutely facing away from her, toward the play structure where Lily was slowly inching her way down. Hannah's chest tightened at the sight of her.

“So you'd rather not find out the truth, and leave Dan completely in the dark just because it might be a bit embarrassing to bring it up? Is that right?”

“Yes. That's about the size of it. Now can we just drop it, please?”

On the way home in the car, Hannah nursed her resentment. Conversation between her and Josh was minimal and to the point. Had she got anything in for dinner? Should they stop off to pick up some dog food for Toby? Were they supposed to bring something for the bake sale at the preschool the next day? Yes. No. Shrug.

Back at the flat, she keenly felt the lack of a separate living space. Josh and Lily positioned themselves on the sofa—Lily to watch some incomprehensible cartoon she'd recently fallen in love with, and Josh to grade a pile of papers. Sitting at the table with her back to them, Hannah couldn't concentrate on the feature she was supposed to be writing. Josh kept pressing the top of his plastic pen in and out—click, click, click—while a cartoon character on the television burst into raucous song. She found herself flicking to Twitter, where she had an account set up to promote herself as a freelancer.

Her fingers jabbed at the keyboard.

My OH is being a wankerpricktosspot.

She stared at the words in the box for a few seconds as Josh clicked his pen maddeningly in and out behind her. Then she pressed delete.