The Witches of Cambridge (21 page)

“No,” Amandine says, “no shopping. I’m just here to see Eliot. I can wait in his—”

“Ah, lovely,” Lauren says, beaming underneath her slightly orange-tinted skin. “I’ll call and let him know you’re here.”

“He’s here?”

Lauren nods, picking up the phone. “He’s in his office.”

Amandine panics. She holds up her hand to stop Lauren putting the call through, but it’s too late.

“Hello, Mr. Walker. I’ve got your wife waiting in reception.” Lauren glances up at Amandine, giving her a reassuring smile. “Yes, your wife. She just arrived.”

In the everlasting minute that passes, Amandine half-considers mumbling an excuse and dashing out as fast as the heavy glass doors will allow her. This is it. She’ll have to explain herself now. She’ll have to confront him. There’s no way around it. And then Eliot appears. He ushers her into his office without saying anything. When he closes his own heavy glass door behind them, he turns to his wife.

“Why are you here?”

“You’re not pleased to see me,” Amandine says. She turns. “I’ll just go.”

“No, sorry. It’s not that, it’s just…I’m busy. It’s the middle of the day. I’m on a case, you know how it is.”

Amandine shrugs. “Not really. I know you’re never happy to see me anymore.” This is it. Now or never.

“That’s not true.”

“It is. Let’s not pretend anymore, okay? I can’t stand it.”

Eliot is silent. He walks behind his desk and sits in his chair.

“Please”—her voice is soft—“I need to know what’s going on. I deserve to know.”

Still Eliot is silent.

“Please.”

Finally he nods. “Okay.”

Amandine can feel a heady mixture of fear and relief wafting off her husband. It mixes with her own sudden rush of terror. Until this point, until he actually admitted it, she’d still been able to entertain a teeny tiny speck of hope, however false she knew it to be. Amandine’s blood sinks to her feet and she sits, falling hard into the chair Eliot’s clients usually occupy.

Eliot won’t look at his wife. He shuffles papers on his desk, shifting them around and around. His phone rings. He doesn’t pick it up. The sound echoes through the room, seeming to amplify with each ring, louder and louder with her silence. Amandine realizes that she’ll have to be the one to begin.

“Tell me who Sylvia is.”

Eliot pulls out a photograph from his desk drawer and slides it across the table. So she doesn’t have to touch it, Amandine shuffles to the edge of her chair and peers at the picture.

“She’s my daughter.”

A
GIRL WITH
long blond hair stares back, with a slightly sullen look, her bright blue eyes so filled with sadness that Amandine can feel exactly what she feels.

Amandine looks up at her husband, utterly confused. Then, in the next horrific moment, she realizes what this means. The girl is his love child. Not only has he been having an affair, but this other woman he fucked got pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. A daughter. Amandine is in such shock that she cannot even cry; her tear ducts have suddenly frozen, along with her heart. How long has he been seeing this woman, the mother of his other child? Was it a one-night stand? Or did it last for years? One thing Amandine is sure of is that Eliot has only just found out about the daughter, he hasn’t known about her all this time.

Eliot finally looks up at his wife. Their eyes meet over the photograph, though neither of them looks down. He swallows, tears filling his eyes again and, despite herself, Amandine is moved.

“She’s my daughter.”

“Yes,” Amandine fires the word at him. “I heard you. What I don’t understand is why the hell you didn’t tell me this as soon as you found out about it. You should have told me!”

“I’m so sorry,” Eliot says, and Amandine can feel he is, he really and truly is. “I wanted to. Every day I wanted to. But I promised her mother, I gave her my word that I wouldn’t tell you and the boys until I’d met Sylvia and—”

At the mention of their sons, Amandine winces and her frozen heart begins to crack. “Don’t,” she says softly, “don’t mention them. Tell me when you started fucking this woman who’s so special you’d keep a promise to her over your own wife?”

“Oh, God, is that what you think?” Eliot gasps. “I’m not having an affair. I was never having an affair. Sylvia’s nearly fifteen. I knew her mother from school, I was only seeing her for a few…minutes. And then I met you.”

Amandine glares at Eliot. But he’s telling the truth. She can sense it. She can feel his turmoil of emotions: sorrow, regret, and confusion. If she couldn’t, she’d never have believed him, not in a million years.

“A few
minutes
?” she asks.

Eliot nods, unable to meet her eye. “Yes, in fact, our relationship lasted a full fifteen minutes in the…um, toilet of the boys’ refectory.”

Despite herself, Amandine laughs. “How romantic.”

Eliot gives her a halfhearted smile. “She never told me I had a daughter,” he says. “I only found out a few months ago, on—”

“The eighth of March.”

“How did you know that?” Eliot frowns. “Yes, her mother wrote to me, asking for money. I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle it, how to tell you and the boys. I didn’t know what…I didn’t know how to make it okay…” Eliot’s beautiful face crumples and he cries, tears falling down his cheeks and onto his desk. “I couldn’t undo it, I couldn’t make it all right…I fucked up. I’ve fucked up our family and I can’t do anything to make it better…”

Amandine stands, knocking the chair to the carpet, and dashes around the desk to her husband. She hugs him from behind, squeezing tight, resting her head against his. She feels his relief, his love, his pure adoration, his fear and confusion.

“It’s all right,” Amandine whispers. “It’s okay.”

Eliot whimpers in her arms, like a small boy, like a tiny, terrified little boy.

“It’s okay,” Amandine says again. “It’ll be okay.”

Although, right now, she doubts very much that it will be.

Eliot nods, still sobbing, mumbling something Amandine can’t hear, and so she just closes her eyes and prays to Bes, Isis, Mama Quilla, Satī, Tsao Wang, Vár, all the gods and goddesses of marriage and family she knows of, for the protection and well-being of those she loves most in this world.

—

Kat paces up and down alongside her chalkboards. Her favorite PhD student, Hamish, watches her with an intrigued frown.

“What are you thinking about?”

Kat stops pacing. He’s looking at her in the intense way he sometimes has, which makes her blush. She studies the piece of chalk she’s holding.

“Nonlinear dynamics and numerical analysis, of course.”

“You are not.”

Kat smiles, her first smile since that awful afternoon. She shrugs, still wondering if her spell took effect. How will she know, since she’s still avoiding them both?

“Okay, perhaps, not.”

“Affairs of the heart.” Hamish sits up. “Tell Uncle Hamish all about it.”

Kat raises an eyebrow. “I hardly think that’s appropriate.”

“Why not? I’m not an undergraduate. We’re virtually colleagues.” Hamish crosses his legs. “Now, I know you’re a lot younger than I am, but don’t worry, I’ve got a very youthful mentality. I’m down with the kids. I’ll understand.”

Kat smiles.

“Let’s go out for a drink,” Hamish says, standing. “Alcohol does a glorious job of annihilating affairs of the heart, no matter how hideous.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah.” Hamish nods. “Many studies have been done, proper mathematical ones, with statistical analysis and everything.”

Kat raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“But of course. I’m surprised you don’t know them. A professor of your standing.”

Kat lets slip a little smile. “All right then, fuck it. Let’s go.”

As they walk down Trinity Street toward the nearest pub, Kat thinks of the most significant drunken experience of her life: the night she told George she loved him, the night he rejected her, the night he shattered her fragile heart. Hamish is right, the best thing—the only thing—to do right now is get completely, utterly, and outrageously drunk.

—

Héloïse has barely slept for the past week. She squints into the mirror, frowning at the bags under her eyes. Reaching for her concealer, she applies generous amounts to the shadows on her skin, then steps back for another look.

“
Merde
.”

You are always beautiful to me, no matter what.

Héloïse almost jumps. And then bursts into tears. She slides down to the bathroom floor, presses her head to her knees, and sobs. It’s several minutes before she can catch her breath.

“I thought you’d gone, I thought you’d gone forever.”

Isn’t that what you wanted?

“No,” Héloïse gasps, “I, I just…”

She feels his touch on her cheek.

“I missed you,” Héloïse whispers. “I’ve missed you so much.”

So, stay with me, mon amour, don’t leave me.

As Héloïse sits, her bare feet pressed to the cold bathroom floor, half-dressed in her silk slip for dinner with Theo, tearstains down her cheeks, she suddenly wants nothing more than to switch out all the lights, pull all the curtains closed, and fade away into François’s arms. What was she thinking? She can’t go out on what is essentially a date with another man. How could she? How can she forgive herself so quickly?

On her hands and knees, Héloïse crawls out of the bathroom and along the upstairs corridor, the soft skin of her knees scraping along the carpet. When she reaches her bedroom, she scrambles over the enormous pile of discarded clothes on the floor in front of her mirror. Reaching her bedside table, Héloïse lifts the receiver off the phone. It rings five times before he answers.

“Theo? It’s Héloïse.”

She can almost hear him smile and, for a moment—holding life in her hand and death in her heart—she wavers. But her heart wins.

“I’m sorry, Theo, I can’t come. I, I’m…Something’s come up. An emergency. I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, God, what’s wrong?” The genuine concern in his voice twists her conscience. “Can I help? I can be there—Magrath Avenue, right?—in ten minutes. Less if I speed a little.”

“No, no, it’s okay, it’s nothing,” Héloïse protests. “Please, don’t come. I just need to stay at home. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to put you out like this.”

“Don’t worry,” Theo says softly, “don’t worry about me. Take care of yourself. And, if there’s anything I can do, please call. Okay?”

Héloïse nods, before realizing he can’t see her.

“Yes,” she lies. “I will. I will.”

When Héloïse slips the receiver back into its cradle, she rests her head against the side of the bed and starts to sob again.

—

While Kat drowns her sorrows in her third pint of Guinness, Hamish sneaks a few admiring glances from beneath the rim of his own glass. He’s been hiding his heart—brimming over with love and adoration—from his supervisor for nearly three years. The first time he saw her, the moment he stepped into the room covered with chalkboards, he was knocked sideways. Mathematical equations were scrawled and scratched along every inch of the room; they twisted and turned through the air like strings of Christmas lights, bobbing along to the precise beat of an invisible metronome. And there, in the center of it all, was the most beguiling woman he’d ever seen. Hamish had known girls before, fellow math students he’d shared a few clumsy fumbling hours with, but he’d never known a
real
woman before: one clearly as clever as she was beautiful, one who loved mathematics as much as he and who surpassed him in her brilliance with numbers at every turn.

Hamish had fallen for Kat, befuddled head over clumsy heels, in that moment and his adoration had only deepened as the years passed. Of course, he knew she could never share his feelings as surely as he knew that
E = mc
²
.
How could a goddess like Kat fall for a silly kid like him? But this knowledge didn’t dull his adoration by the smallest fraction or the slightest decimal place. Hamish is not a man of great emotional ambition. Professionally, he dreams of being as acclaimed as Johannes Kepler or Joseph Fourier. Academically, as far as his head is concerned, he longs for life-changing things. But for his heart, Hamish has fairly modest aspirations. For his heart, Hamish is content with physical proximity and mathematical conversation.

Finally sitting with Kat in a pub and skirting personal subjects (even if they seem to suggest she has feelings for another man) makes Hamish happier than he could have dreamed possible.

Kat glances up from her now empty glass. “Another one?”

“Always,” Hamish says, scrambling to his feet and hurries off in the direction of the bar, downing the rest of his own beer on the way. When he returns with two more pints of Guinness, Hamish slides into the seat next to Kat. If she notices his swift change of place, she doesn’t show it.

“So,” Hamish says, “are you going to tell Uncle Hamish all about this nasty cad who broke your heart?”

Kat sighs. “He’s not a cad, actually. He’s a very sweet man. He just doesn’t love me. At least, not in the way I want him to.”