The Last Goodbye (14 page)

I breathed the city air deep into my lungs and powered on. I stopped at a red light, before taking off again when it changed. I went to go straight but the car beside me was turning left and he had to jam on. I stopped the bike just in time. He sat on his horn. Instantly I felt my temper rise.

“Watch where you’re going!” I roared at him. I could see him shouting back at me through the glass. I gave him the finger and got back up on my bike.

I reached my flat and opened the door. Will’s car was already outside. Well, thank goodness for that, I thought. I wheeled my bike into the hall and climbed the stairs.

When I opened the door and saw the suitcases, the same ones that he had used to move in just three weeks earlier, I knew. The expression on his face said the rest.

“What’s going on, Will?”

“I’m sorry, Nat – I’m so, so sorry.” There were tears in his eyes. “I have to go home.”

“No – Will – no – please don’t do this!” I begged.

“She wants me back – I have to go.”

“But why?”

“I have to – she rang me today to talk. The kids have taken the break-up badly and she wants me to come home.”

“But you left her for me – you can’t just change your mind three weeks later!”

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t leave her . . .” He let out a heavy sigh. “She threw me out.”

So Kate was right. “But, but . . . you said, you said that you left her?”

“No, I didn’t, Nat, I never said that I’d left her.”

“But . . .” None of this was making any sense to me.

“She overheard us talking on the night you rang to finish with me. She confronted me then. After talking to you I was a broken man and I didn’t bother trying to deny it. So I came clean. I told her everything and she threw me out. And then when I turned up here with my suitcases, well . . . you just assumed that I had left her and I didn’t have the heart to tell you . . . I’m sorry, Nat, I should have been upfront with you.”

“So you came running to me then – oh, good old Nat will take me in, was that it?”

He shook his head and came over and put his arms around me. I pushed him away.

“No – it wasn’t like that. I wanted to be with you.”

“
Wanted?
”

“Want – I still want to be with you. The last three weeks, waking up beside you every morning, have been the best of my life – but I have to go.”

“So that’s all I was then? A roof over your head – a stopgap while your wife made her mind up about what the future held for her marriage?”

“No, Nat – that’s not it at all. That was never it. I love you, you know I do.”

“But you lied – you let me think that you had left her to be with me!”

“Because I knew you’d think I didn’t choose to be with you otherwise.”

“
Well, you didn’t!
” I was screaming now. I could hear my own voice shrill with emotion and it didn’t sound like me at all.

“But it’s you that I want to be with – you know that if things were different –”

“I never asked you to leave your wife! I was happy with the way things were. You didn’t have to lie to me, Will!”

“I know, Nat – if you only knew how shit I feel right now.”

“I had accepted that you would never leave your kids, so then, when you landed on my doorstep telling me that your marriage was over, I thought it was a dream come true – something I had never dared hope might happen! You’ve sent me up to the top of the world so I felt I was flying above the clouds and then brought me back down again, without the parachute!”

He said nothing.

“I just can’t believe you would do that to me. I thought what we had was special,” I said in disbelief.

“It was – is. Look, you have to believe me: if I had my time again, I would be with you and only you.”

“There you go again, why do you keep saying that? Look, it’s not too late, Will. You don’t have to go. Just stay here – with me. I know it will be tough for a while but you’ll ride it out – you’re strong.” I walked over and brushed his cheek with my finger. There was a faint trace of stubble. I ran my finger over the scar in his eyebrow from when he fell against the kitchen table as a child. I knew every inch of his face – what his face felt like under my fingertips. What he tasted like. How he breathed. Everything.

“But can’t you see? It’s just not that straightforward. We have three children together and she doesn’t want them to grow up in a broken home. Elliott’s teacher called her in for a meeting yesterday because he’s falling behind. It’s affecting them.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Ben, Kate’s husband, is Elliott’s teacher.”

“Ben is Mr Chamberlain?” he asked incredulously.

I nodded.

“But when did you find this out?”

“Only today,” I sighed. “Ben was telling Kate about his meeting with a pupil’s mum yesterday and they put two and two together and realised that the pupil’s mum was also your wife.”

“I see.” He ran his hands down over his face. “Fucking hell, what are the chances of that in a city of over eight million people!”

“Please don’t go, Will.”

“She calls the shots. It could never be any other way – it’s not my decision!”

“Of course it’s your decision.”

“I have to go, Nat – whatever she wants I have to do it.”

“No, you don’t, Will. No, you don’t! You’re a grown man so why can’t you stand up to her?”

“She has me over a barrel – she hasn’t told her father about what happened yet but, if she does, I can guarantee that he’ll squeeze me out of the firm.”

“But even if you go back to her, she still could tell her dad and what’s to say he won’t push you out then?”

“He wouldn’t do that, because it would injure her and the children. In any case, she won’t tell him – I know her – she’s too proud. And everything – our whole lives – is built around my job. If I go home we’ll go back to our charade of happy families and no one will ever know about this.”

“So that’s what it all comes down to – the prestige of your job means more than what you have with me – is that it?” I spat at him.

“It’s not that simple, Nat – you know that. It’s not just the job – we have three children together too.”

“But you can’t, Will, you can’t do this to me!” I was trying hard to digest what he was telling me. I started to cry then. I think it was starting to hit me. “Why did you marry her?” Tears of frustration and desperation spilled down my face because things were spinning so far out of my control. This was not in my hands.

“You know why. I had no choice.”

“Yes, you had – we all have choices in life but you wanted the glory of being at the top.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I did.”

“But you don’t have to keep on living by one wrong choice.”

“Yes, I do,” he said wearily. “My whole life is built around Thea – she’s my wife, the mother of my children, the daughter of my boss, the friend of my friends’ wives.”

“But money isn’t everything. You would walk into another job tomorrow. Surely love means more than a job?” I knew I was pleading, begging even.

“It’s not just a job, Nat – I have worked hard my entire life to prove myself and to get to where I am today – I have three children who I can afford to put through the best public schools and top universities, who can go on skiing holidays to Klosters in the winter, Sandy Lane in Barbados in the summer and to the south of France at half-term. They do after-school activities that I have never even heard of. They will grow up and marry people like them, who grew up with the same privileges that they had. I can give them all of that. They can have everything that I never had growing up. Love can’t put food on the table or provide the upbringing for my family that I never had, but money can.”

His words pierced through me. I slapped him across the face then. It just happened – I didn’t know I was going to do it. We both recoiled from the shock. I had never hit anybody in my life before.

“I suppose I probably deserve that,” he said as he put a hand up gingerly to touch his face.

The palm of my hand stung as the blood rushed to the surface of my skin from the force of the slap, so it must have hurt him.

“So that’s it then, it all comes down to money,” I said, my voice bitter.

“Please, Nat, I don’t want things to end like this.”

He reached for my hand. I could feel the roughness of his skin as I pulled away from his touch.

“I think you should leave now,” I said coolly.

I held open the door for him. He walked out the door with his cases. He stood there and looked at me.

“I’m sorry.” And then he turned and walked down the stairs.

I knew this would be how it ended – deep down I had always known it.

After he had gone, I closed the door and dissolved into a heap on the floor. I raged and I threw things around my living room. Bell X1’s ‘Eve’ was playing on the radio in the background. I had never listened to the words properly before but they seemed so apt now. Then I had to run to the bathroom to be sick. I sat on the cool white tiles of my bathroom floor, with my back resting against the shower door. I cried breathless tears that just kept on coming.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that because when I woke up I was still slumped on the floor and it was bright outside. My neck was stiff and sore from the angle that my head had been hanging at. I stood up, using the shower to lever me, and walked over to the sink and splashed water on my face. I stood staring at myself in the mirror, water dripping off my face. I looked terrible. My mascara had run down my cheeks leaving kohl trails, like something painted by a child on a white page with watery paints. My whole body literally ached for him. I had given him my heart and he had trampled on it.

On autopilot, I took off my clothes and got into the shower. I just stood there, letting the water drain down around me, unable to squirt shower gel onto my loofah or raise my arms to shampoo my hair. This was what happened when you opened yourself up to someone, I thought – you paid the price.

Chapter 18

I honestly never set out to have an affair. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I always thought that women who had affairs with married men were somehow weak and needy and even a bit dysfunctional. But I now know that we don’t choose who we fall in love with. My usual types were musicians, artists, that sort. The scraggly hair, unkempt clothing, that whole skinny-tortured-artist look did it for me. They were usually distant sorts and usually had their problems. But Will was the very opposite of all of that. He was loving and attentive – when I was with him no one else mattered. He wore suits tailored in Savile Row, white-collared dress shirts with cufflinks, silk ties and shiny Oxford shoes – in fact, he was the furthest removed thing from a tortured artist. He was a partner in a leading City investment bank. But he did have something in common with those other men, a roughness around the edges. He had a ruddiness in his cheeks and lines in his face that no amount of money could eradicate.

He grew up on a council estate in Slough – his dad was a plumber and his mum a cleaner. He went to the local co-ed school. He got the job in the bank through a stroke of luck. He had been selling cars as a seventeen-year-old when a banker came in to buy a car from him. The man had been so impressed by Will’s bolshiness that he had offered him a job as a junior trader. Will moved to London and had started on the floor alongside people with college degrees, but he had quickly learned the ropes. His aggressive nature stood to him and he wasn’t afraid to put in the hours. He was promoted to senior trader soon after, then to floor manager, and he continued to work his way up until he was made partner. It was where he had met his wife Thea. She was the daughter of the company’s founder and head of the board but he hadn’t known this when they first met. He told me that it was clear that she liked him from early on, so he had asked her out. They had started seeing each other casually for a while but it was obvious that she wanted more from their relationship whereas he wasn’t looking for anything serious. It was at the same time that Will had made up his mind to finish with her that she had dropped the bombshell of who her father was. He hadn’t had the balls to end it then. Will knew already that he didn’t quite fit in with the usual fuddy-duddy Eton-educated types that populated the top ranks of the company and he was afraid that if he crossed her, he could kiss goodbye to any chance he had of gaining access to the higher echelons that he so desperately craved. So their relationship had coasted along and he tried his best to make it work. He had wooed her with romantic gestures like punting along the River Cam and lunchtime picnics on the Heath. He had even surprised her with a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to the Galapagos Islands. Weekends were spent visiting her friends or licking arse on the golf course with her parents. He had asked her father for her hand in marriage soon after and then he had proposed. He told me that their wedding had been a lavish affair – there were more people from the firm there than from his own family but it suited him that way. Their honeymoon had cost more per night than most people in London spent on rent in an entire month. Two weeks after they came back from honeymoon, Thea had found out she was pregnant and then her father had finally made him a partner. That was the way it was.