The Missing One (10 page)

I decide not to even try and get him into his suit – he'll boil in the car anyway. He wriggles and kicks as I wash his
hands, roaring, ‘No!' So I put him down and he's off again, in a flash, back into the cubicle, pulling the loo roll out again, gleefully.

‘No. You stop that,' I go back in and sweep him up, prying his hand off the loo roll. ‘Let's go, love. No more loo roll. Let's go now, OK?'

He considers a tantrum; I see the thought march across his brow as I sweep out of the cubicle with him. ‘Look!' I point, pathetically, at the lights. ‘Lights! All those lights!' I will just have to leave the mess behind us. Before I had Finn I thought people like me were anti-social monsters, letting their children destroy public property. But now I know that motherhood is largely about damage limitation and survival tactics. I wonder if we are being watched on a security camera. Vandals.

‘Let's go now, love.' I hang on to him as he wriggles and squawks. ‘Come on.' I blow his neck and it makes a farting noise. He shrieks with joy.

‘Again! Again!'

Tantrum averted. I blow and slobber on his neck again. His laughter is a whisker away from screaming – and I can't blame him because, essentially, I feel the same way.

With my free hand I shove the other things I've bought into our suitcase, gripping his heavy body against my hip with the other arm. He clings to me like a baby chimpanzee. ‘Again! Again!' I blow his neck again. He roars.

And then we go. I don't look at my phone. I try to make this a positive decision, too. I will text Doug from the B & B, and call Alice, and email my father again later. Geographical distance is nothing. With modern technology there is no escape any more. It is basically impossible to flee.

As Finn and I step from the lift into the massive multistorey parking lot, it occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea what the hire car looks like, or even which floor I parked it on.

*

I pull onto the highway, remembering to drive on the right. The automatic gears are surprisingly easy to use and there is less traffic now, since we took so long to find the car, walking round the parking lot, pressing the key, listening for a beep. Finn loved the ‘find the car' game, but I became slightly panicky. What if I never found it?

There is no view of the mountains above Vancouver, or of the skyscrapers that are presumably behind us, or of the sea stretching out somewhere to the right; all I can see is tail lights, rain and a rodent-grey sky. Mercifully, Finn looks dozy again. His cheeks are flushed and his blue bunny is pressed under his chin like a travel pillow.

I switch to a local radio station and try to relax. It isn't far to the turn-off. I have Google maps on my phone. This is fine. I keep to the 100 km per hour speed limit and stay firmly in the middle lane. It occurs to me that right now, no one knows that I am driving down a highway in Canada.

I should call Doug. At the very least he should know we landed safely. But Doug is the last person I can face calling. My hands tighten on the wheel. It's like walking in a circular maze where every thought leads, eventually, to the same dead end: Doug, and what he has been doing.

I have worked so hard to keep her words out of my head, but suddenly, they are blaring through my brain.

I miss you, spiritually, emotionally and physically
.

It is the intimacy of the phrase that undoes me. These are not the words of an ex-girlfriend with regrets. This is a present-tense missing; a lover's longing – ludicrous and overblown and intrusive.

I don't know what made me pick his phone up. Usually when Doug's phone beeps I ignore it. Doug's phone beeps all the time – texts or emails from paranoid students, lazy students, confused students; texts about staff meetings, faculty meetings, university sub-group meetings, college admin meetings; alerts about conferences, papers, supervisions, committees; editor queries, publisher queries. His phone beeps endlessly.

But maybe I sensed her the way you sense the burglar in the house without hearing a footfall. He must have felt the energy in the house shift, too, when I picked it up, because he called through from the bath: ‘Hey, Kal? Was that my phone?' Or was he expecting her message?

I stood there by the bed and her words marched in hobnail boots across my heart.

‘Kal?' Did he, in the bath, sound anxious? Guilty? Fearful?

I held onto his phone and struggled to work out what I was reading. For a moment I thought maybe I had sent this text. I could say the same thing. But then I understood. And it made an awful kind of sense.

That is the worst thing. It makes sense.

Her words form a tiny door that leads onto precipitous, awful roads inside me. There are all sorts of details that I
don't want to know, but probably will have to hear at some point. Did she wear him down, or was it easy? Did he leap at the chance to get away from the exhausting reality of me and Finn: the sleeplessness and resentment and nappies and feeds and teething and preoccupations? The first time it happened were they in some foreign city where it almost didn't count? On how many occasions has Doug, specifically, lied to me?

I heard the squeak of his feet on enamel and the slosh of water as he stood up and I put the phone on the bedside table. I went downstairs and stood in our kitchen, hemmed in by the Ikea cabinets that we chose together. And as they swayed in and out overhead, I made myself a mug of peppermint tea. When I got back up, more than an hour later, Doug was already asleep – or pretending to be. I picked up his phone again.

He had deleted her message.

He must have deleted others from her, too, because I took the phone down to the living room and searched through all his texts and there was only one more from her, but it confirmed everything.

She had sent it the previous Tuesday. He'd been to a meeting in London that day. She sent it at 8 a.m., when, presumably, she knew that he would be stepping onto the Paddington train.

Have a great day, gorgeous.

Words that small can only come from something huge.

I sat on our leather armchair in the front room that we painted together – sail white – when we bought the house. There is a tidemark now on the walls, marking Finn's progress from pulling up to walking: a band of mucky fingerprints, crayon trails, the round imprints of bouncy balls and, above this, pure sail white waiting for him to grow. I sat on our chair all night, surrounded by the sea of our little family life – toys and board books and socks and biscuit crumbs, a pile of bills waiting to be dealt with, the rug we chose last year, way too expensive, already stained by Ribena. And I plucked facts from my memory like poisonous berries.

I found that I could remember all sorts of surprising things about her. She directs documentaries, mainly on classical or archaeological subjects. Her flat is somewhere off the Goldhawk Road. She reached Grade 8 in piano. She knows how to walk glamorously in stiletto heels. She got a double first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She wears Issey Miyake perfume. She went to a girls' school in Berkshire. She was devastated when Doug finished their relationship. She told him her life was over, and she was only twenty-one. She threatened to take an overdose. Then she took a whole year out, in Florence, or Paris, to get over him. Well, it clearly didn't work because eighteen years on, she still wants him back.

They met for a drink in London, some time around Christmas – a year ago, almost exactly. I remember it. Finn was nearly six months old. Just learning to sit up, wobbling and
grabbing at things, starting to eat solids, beaming and pointing and giggling, teething. Is that how long this has been going on? A year ago, I was still breastfeeding our child. It is all such a tired old cliché.

I remember Doug telling me that she'd been in touch after Sean's wedding. He looked uncomfortable when he told me this. I remember that now. He wouldn't meet my eye. He said she wanted to talk to him about Cantor or Pythagoras or something for a documentary she was making about mathematicians. He ran a hand through his hair, saying he'd have to get the late train home. I remember that I was furious with him: yet again I'd be doing the bedtime routine alone. Then I felt guilty because he had dark circles under his eyes, too. And his job paid the mortgage now.

I didn't even ask how their meeting went. She was ancient history and I had too many other things to think about: should Finn be allowed peanuts? Was baby-led weaning really safe? Should I try Gina Ford because this lack of sleep was killing me? Was he teething? Or was this a genuine fever? If so, could it be the first signs of meningitis?

I just never tuned in to Doug because all my wavelengths were bursting with Finn. Perhaps that's why he was sucked in by her. I was too busy with the epic task of keeping our baby healthy and fed and clean and safe, to notice him. She, in contrast, noticed every detail; validated him from the inside out – or the outside in.

I remember once, last autumn, we got a babysitter for the first time and drove out to the White Hart for lunch. Doug was stressed about some panel, or committee, some new
piece of university bureaucracy and I just wasn't listening – I was somewhere else entirely, circling high above the pub, floating over the russet countryside with the glint of the Thames in my eye as Doug's voice mingled with the wind. The sheer relief of being out of the house was overwhelming and yet, simultaneously, anxious thoughts bubbled up, one after another. Would the babysitter remember to give him his bunny? Was he crying right now? Would she microwave the milk, causing hot pockets to burn his mouth? No wonder Doug fell for her: a glamorous redhead, who had adored him for more than eighteen years, and was hell-bent on getting him back.

But even so. How could he?

I realize that if I do this – if I let myself think all this – I'm going to have to go back over a whole year of academic conferences, meetings, trips, and work out exactly how many times he might have been with her, and lying to me. And I can't do that.

But how many times did he lie to me? Casual mentions of her name seem electric now. Some time around Easter, someone's fortieth in Shepherd's Bush; her name slotted into a list of five or six of his old college friends. I didn't go. Finn still wasn't sleeping through the night. He'd wake four, five times and need to be coaxed, sung to, held, then eased back into his cot, inch by inch. I was sleep deprived to the point of lunacy, forgetting to wash the shampoo out of my hair; driving out of Sainsbury's with the weekly shop still in the trolley in the car park; losing keys. I didn't care where Doug was or who he was with.

But the thing that I really can't get my head around is that this is Doug. This is not some other man. It's as if I'm dealing with two entirely separate people here. There is the Doug, my Doug, the solid husband, the good father, who would never, ever do this because he loves me, and always will. And then there is this other Doug, this out-of-reach stranger who has betrayed me, lied and broken us apart.

Presumably it started at Sean's wedding. I remember her in a very short dress; all that hair, a Pilates core and those legs. Doug even introduced us. I remember feeling shabby with my belly stuffed into Spanx, my leaking breasts tamped down in a big maternity bra and baby-sick on the shoulder of my black dress. I remember growing dumpier and scruffier every second that she looked at me. And she did look at me – I remember her eyes. How intensely she looked at me.

Then I forgot all about her. I was mildly curious, but nothing more. After the wedding I slotted her into a list of his posh Oxbridge friends, people I have never really felt comfortable with. I forgot about her when I should have seen her coming at us like a juggernaut.

I could check his Facebook. I know his password. In situations like this that's what spurned wives do: they dig for proof. But I can't do that. Really, what is there to find out? It's obvious – surely. Isn't it?

I wonder if I'd handle this differently if it had happened at another time. The timing is certainly unbelievable. I would have just confronted him. I was going to do that. I was waiting for dawn in our leather armchair, because I was going
to go and wake him up, and show him what I'd seen on his phone and demand to know what the hell was going on.

The blare of a car horn jolts me back – an elbow-straight, furious bellowing. Yellow headlamps loom. I jerk the wheel, swerving out of the oncoming lane with just inches between my bonnet and the bumper of a towering silver truck. The horn continues to sound as it vanishes behind me. Finn lets out a high-pitched, baby animal noise – part terror, part question.

‘It's OK, love. It's OK.' My arms quake at the elbows, and there is that metallic taste in the back of my mouth again. The hire car wipers swish and thud and I try to hold the wheel straight but my arms are wobbling. ‘It's OK, everything's OK. You're just in the car. I'm right here.' His wailing escalates. I have to get off the freeway before I kill us both.

I veer off at the next exit and pull into a petrol station. My heart is battering in my throat. I get out and walk round to open Finn's door. He is, rightly, hysterical. I undo the restraints and haul him out. He howls, red-faced; snot and confusion and protest surge out of his body. I hug him tight and shush him; I try to kiss his wet face, but he struggles and wails even more loudly, so I pin him to me and run through the rain to the kiosk.

The woman behind the counter looks at me as if I'm a child murderer. So I take him straight to the toilets and lock the door. I lie him on the nappy-changing table, but he screams and kicks – his foot catches me on the cheekbone and anger suddenly surges up, ‘NO!' I bark. ‘Stop!' He pauses mid-yell, his eyes round and startled. Then he takes a huge
breath and begins again, louder, from the gut. Proper tears roll down his cheeks like shining gel balls.

‘Oh no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, it's OK, Mummy's tired too, that's all. Poor baby, my poor little boy.' I wipe at his tears, snap the poppers on his dungarees and scoop him up, holding him close against me again. His cries are more pitiful now, less rage, more genuine distress. He clings.