What She Never Told Me (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

I’ve forgotten about the August bank holiday. Notting Hill is already revving up for Carnival when I get back home, late in the afternoon. Shops are boarding up their windows and the empty residents’ parking bays tell me that the exodus of those who can get away has begun. The sunlight is pouring into the kitchen, blasting its way through the dense foliage of the trees outside. It’s hot and it’s going to get hotter and stickier. I don’t want to be here for the two days of relentless heat, noise and crowds, so I start thinking about whether I should go straight back to Ireland or ask Ursula if I can go and stay with her. I call Ursula.

‘Can I come to your place for a couple of days? It’s Carnival weekend.’

‘Of course you can. And you can tell me how you got on with David Prescott.’

‘Ah. Look, I’m sorry, I thought it was better to go on my own because—’

‘Don’t tell me now. Save it for later. When are you coming?’

‘In the next hour or so. You sure it’s okay? I’m not putting you out?’

‘It’s okay and you’re not.’

Just as I finish talking to Ursula, the landline rings. I pick it up, expecting it to be one of those marketing calls because most people who want to get hold of me use my mobile. But it’s Angela.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ she says.

‘Oh, sorry, Angela, I’ve been out. I had to switch off my phone and then I forgot to turn it back on. Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine. But I have someone here who wants to talk to you.’

After a few seconds of silence, I hear another voice.

‘Louise.’ It’s Sandy. He sounds awkward, unsure of himself. Tired. ‘I flew over last night. You weren’t at the house, so I went to the hotel. I thought you might be at Angela’s. We’ve been calling you. We were . . . I’ve been worried.’

I almost feel like laughing. When I was waiting in a state of high anxiety for him to come back to the flat last night, he was on an aeroplane to Ireland.

‘I need to see you, Louise. I need to tell you what’s real and what’s not and put things right. I don’t want to lose you. I love you.’

This is what I’ve wanted, prayed for. He’s on the phone and he wants me back. It’s not too late. I could tell him I’m taking the next flight to Dublin because I need to see him too and can’t bear the thought of losing him, no matter what he has done. But I can’t go that far. Something stops me. My wounds have stopped bleeding, but they could burst open again at any moment.

‘I don’t know what to say, Sandy,’ I hear myself saying.

‘Just say . . . Just say that you’ll meet me and listen to what I have to say. Please.’

‘Okay. But I’m not promising anything.’

‘I’ll try to get on the next flight back to Heathrow.’

‘No, don’t.’ Am I really saying this? Does my voice really sound so cold? ‘I’m going to stay at Ursula’s for a couple of days to get away from Carnival. I can see you on Tuesday, if you like.’

‘I love you, Louise,’ he says again.

I have no answer to that, so I just say goodbye.

‘I’ll see you on Tues—’ I hear him say as I end the call.

I throw a few things into a small case, make sure the windows are closed and walk to the car. The air is heavier now. By midday tomorrow, the area will be heaving, the sound systems throwing out heavy-duty noise at decibel levels that make you think you’re going to have a heart attack, even if you’re on the other side of the street. ‘You’re turning into a grumpy old bat,’ I scold myself, remembering for a moment the times when I was a committed Carnival-goer, dancing in the streets, high on a mix of reggae and sunshine.

I wonder whether Sandy will stay at Angela’s for the weekend or come back to London, to the flat. I wonder whether I have made the right decision in putting off seeing him until next week. But it’s all too much to think about. I get into the car, turn the radio on to a pop-music station and head to Ursula’s.

She doesn’t say it outright, but I can tell Ursula is annoyed that I went to see David Prescott without her.

‘Sorry, Urse. I know we agreed that you would come with me, but then I thought it might be a bit much for David if two of us turned up.’

‘So what did he have to say? Did you ask him the right questions?’

‘They weren’t the right questions, but I did ask them. I asked him if it was possible that my mother had given birth to twins but that she only told him about one of them and had the other one fostered. And I mentioned your suggestion that when his child died, my mother turned around, went back to Ireland and told the foster family I’d been left with that she wanted me back.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, Ursula, you’re such a gobshite sometimes. Can’t you hear now how ridiculous the whole idea was? Of course he said no.
No
,
no
and
no
.’

‘Well, it was worth a try,’ she says, indefatigable as ever. ‘So, what’s next?’

‘I’ll probably go back over in the next month or so and see if I can get hold of this Liam O’Connor. I’m not overly optimistic about what I’ll get from that, but at least I’ll be doing something. After that, I don’t know what the next move is going to be. It’s not really something I can go to the police with, is it?’

‘What about a private detective?’

My first reaction is to laugh. People like me don’t hire private detectives. But then I see that this might not be a bad idea.

‘Do you know any?’

‘No, but I could help you find one.’

‘Look, there’s something else I have to tell you.’ I launch into an account of the phone conversation with Sandy.

‘Sounds like you’re going to be more forgiving than I would be, but if that’s what you want . . .’

‘I don’t know what I want any more, Ursula. And there’s one more thing. Remember Declan?’

She nods.

I lower my eyes. ‘I’ve been seeing him.’

‘Jesus, you’re a dark horse! And what does “seeing” mean, exactly?’

‘Do I have to explain?’

‘Power to your elbow. So is this why you’re not running straight back into Sandy’s arms?’

‘I don’t think so, but it’s a good question, I suppose.’

‘And have you told Declan about . . . ?’

‘No. I couldn’t. It would . . . He wouldn’t just hate me for it. It would wreck him. I know it would.’

‘Listen, Lou, ordinarily I wouldn’t say a bloke has a right to know whether the girl he’s been screwing is pregnant or not, or whether she has an abortion or not, unless she chooses to tell him,’ she says. ‘But this is different. It’s not just about a baby and an abortion; it’s tied in with everything that has happened to you. I think you have to tell him. But not for his sake. For yours.’

*

On Tuesday afternoon, I’m back home. There’s no sign of Sandy having returned to the flat. He calls me around five o’clock and asks whether it would be all right for him to come around at seven.

‘I thought we might go out to dinner, talk then,’ he says. ‘I’ve booked a table at that French place in St John’s Wood, the one with the garden. But I can cancel it if you’d rather not go out.’

‘No, it’s fine. See you at seven.’

When he turns up, he doesn’t let himself into the flat, but rings the bell, and when I open the door, we exchange awkward half-smiles. I’m torn between a desperate urge to throw my arms around him and a nervousness that makes me stand back from him. I keep my distance. He doesn’t make any attempt to embrace me, either. Neither of us is taking it for granted that we’ll get beyond this.

‘Angela and Joe were on good form,’ he says by way of conversation, turning the engine on and pulling out into the traffic.

‘When did you get back?’

‘A couple of hours ago. It’s okay, I can stay at Geoff’s or I can stay at a hotel. I’m not assuming anything.’

The restaurant is full, inside and out. Sandy has booked a table in the garden, the most romantic place we could be, because it’s filled with the scent of jasmine and lit by flickering candles. But there’s nothing romantic about the situation we are in and, for a moment, I feel vexed that he has chosen this place. Is this all he thinks he needs to do to win me back?

Throughout our marriage, I’ve always allowed him to set the framework for any serious discussion, deferring to what I had always seen as his superior emotional and psychological awareness and sensitivity. Apart from the night he told me he was leaving for a while because he needed space, his approach has usually been to ease us into any potentially difficult conversation, to wait until the prospect of an angry eruption has passed. Now, I’m sure, he would like us to ease gently into the things we have to talk about, after we’ve chosen the food, after we’ve had that first glass of wine. But I’m not deferring to him now. He has fucked up big time. He has lost any right to determine the rules of engagement.

‘So,’ I begin, as the waiter disappears with our drinks order, ‘what have you got to say?’

‘I’m sorry I caused you such pain,’ he says slowly, looking down at his hands. ‘I want to make it up to you. I want to stay married to you.’

‘You might want to look at me when you say stuff like this, Sandy. You’re not convincing me.’

‘I’m ashamed of what I did, Louise.’

‘What about Julia? And the baby?’

‘I don’t love Julia. I never did. I was seduced by her. I love you. And there’s no baby.’

‘What? She had an abortion?’

‘There never was a baby.’

I stare at him, looking for the lie. His face is a map of shifting expressions that I’m unable to read.

‘You mean you’re going to tell me she made it up? That you didn’t continue the affair with her after we got back together? Oh, Sandy, please, no lies.’

‘I’m not lying. I did stop seeing her. I stopped going to choir. There was just one night when I agreed to see her because she’d been badgering me, and . . . well, I ended up getting pissed. It was just that one time. It meant nothing. Then she told me she was pregnant and I knew it wasn’t impossible.’

‘And that’s your excuse? You got pissed and she took advantage of you. What did she have that you found so irresistible? Do you remember that night you walked out on me, last year, when you told me we needed a break from each other? Why couldn’t you have been honest with me? You told me there was no one else involved. You let me think there was something wrong with our marriage.’

‘But there was.’

‘Something wrong?’

‘Can’t you remember?’

I shake my head. ‘No. But now that we’re talking about it, you’d better tell me.’

‘Look, I did lie about Julia. But she was just a part of the whole thing. You and I weren’t getting on. I feel bad saying this, because I understand so much more now, after everything that’s happened since your mother died, but all you seemed to think or care about for so long was finding your real father, even though you were doing nothing about it. And it was as if nothing else mattered. I felt as if . . . well, as if I didn’t matter, either. I felt that I just wasn’t enough for you. I’m not excusing what I did – I’m really not doing that – and I know how pathetic and ridiculous I may sound right now, but we’d stopped being the way we used to be. Julia . . . Julia just happened to be there.’

I want to dismiss what he’s saying, tell him that he’s right and that it does sound like a pathetic excuse. But, even as he’s still speaking, I try to cast my mind back and, with every little push, I remember the spats we had. They were always the same. I would mention my father and my latest idea for finding him or for tricking my mother into telling me where he lived. It got to the point where Sandy would refuse to discuss it and pick up a paper or turn on the television. And then I stopped talking about it. I stopped talking about a lot of things. Maybe our marriage had become so difficult that Sandy had needed to get away from it. But why had he taken up with someone else? Why Julia?

‘Did you know she was coming to me for lessons?’

‘Not at the time. I had no idea. That was . . .’

‘A bit sick? Yes, it was. The whole thing was a bit sick. But I want to know more about the baby. You said there never was one. Did she make it up?’

‘I really don’t know. I think she convinced herself she was pregnant.’

‘And if it hadn’t been a false alarm? Would you have left me for her? Again?’

He doesn’t answer straight away.

‘If there had been a baby . . .’ He leaves the sentence unfinished.

I wait, my heart beating time in milliseconds. And, when he speaks again, it’s not what I want to hear.

‘I honestly don’t know.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I’ve been apprehensive about my first session with Sheila after the break, having to tell her that everything has been a sham, nothing but lies. All the lies my mother told. Sandy’s lies. I had been so confident as I walked away from our final session before I left for Ireland. Now I’m in a worse position than I was when I started my therapy.

‘I’m afraid I’ve gone backwards, not forwards,’ I say. And, as I lie down on the couch, the floodgates open. Almost without stopping for breath, I tell her about the shock of Julia’s phone call and Sandy’s treachery. I don’t tell her about Declan. He’s not significant. He’s not really part of the story. And, anyway, if I do tell her about him, we will end up going back all those years to the abortion. I’m fed up of talking about the distant past. I want to move forward.

‘You’ve had quite an eventful few weeks,’ Sheila says when I stop talking. She shows no sign of surprise, but seems to take it all in her stride. I can sense that she’s waiting for me to start talking again, but I say nothing. I’m emotionally exhausted after the rush of information I’ve given her.

‘Would you like to talk a bit more about what happened with Sandy and Julia?’ she asks eventually.

‘What’s there to talk about? It’s all out in the open now and he’s promised to be a good boy. But only because there’s no baby, after all.’

‘Do you think Sandy became involved with Julia because he wanted a younger woman who could give him a child?’

‘I don’t know. I’m fed up thinking about it and trying to understand it. But I think he became involved with her because she’s beautiful and she flattered him. She flattered me, too. That’s how she seduces people. I think he’s convinced himself that he wants to make our marriage work now. But I think he would have left me for her, for good, if there really had been a baby.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Not great. Inadequate. It’s as if . . . well, I get to hold on to Sandy only because Julia wasn’t pregnant, after all. It doesn’t exactly bolster my confidence, does it?’

‘Don’t you think there are other reasons Sandy wants to stay with you?’

She has a point. There must be other reasons. I close my eyes and think back over the years, conjure up a pageant of scenes from our life together that make sense of what she was saying. It seems simple: we love each other, so that should be enough to start us off on the right track again. Yet his betrayal still tears through me like a sharp knife, and the only thing I can pin it on is my failure to give him a child, even though he has brought up my obsession with my real father as something that had introduced tension in our marriage long before his affair with Julia. But I can’t bear to think too much about all this. It’s easier to put the blame for everything squarely on Sandy.

I sit up and turned around to face her.

‘You knew of Sandy professionally. Aren’t you shocked by all this, by the way he’s behaved?’

She gives her head a small shake. ‘Louise, it doesn’t matter what people do for a living. We’re all human. We all act out what’s going on inside us. Even someone like Sandy.’

*

My first day back at the studios was filled with back-to-back sessions and, though I was exhausted at the end of it, I was exhilarated to be doing normal things again. There was a sealed envelope waiting for me when I arrived. Inside was a note from Julia with just two words written on it:
I’m sorry
. Ben came for a lesson and asked shyly about Julia’s whereabouts. I told him she had decided to go to someone else. He looked disappointed, but said nothing more.

I’ve seen Sandy several times. It’s as if we’re dating, getting to know each other again, except that he’s the one who wants to talk about the future, while I’m stuck wrestling with the past. We are careful in our dealings with each other. Sometimes, when I feel his hand on my back as he guides me to a restaurant table, an electric current runs through me and, for a second or two, I’m ready to capitulate. But the thought of Julia is still too raw.

We talk about her. It’s a tiny bit of comfort to learn that he didn’t move in with her when he left me last year, but really had stayed at Geoff’s flat. ‘She was an interlude, that’s all. I was bewitched for a while. She was never meant to be long term.’ That’s what he says, over and over again.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I say one day, remembering the session when Julia told me she was pregnant and I had assumed then that the baby was Ben’s. ‘When did Julia tell you she was pregnant?’

He lowers his eyes. ‘It was that time when I told you it was the hospital calling. I’m sorry.’

‘But . . . now I’m confused,’ I say. ‘She didn’t tell you until then? I thought you had lunch with her at Le Caprice.’

‘That was . . . I’m sorry; that wasn’t long after the night . . . you know . . . the night I got pissed and . . .’ He trails off and coughs. ‘She asked me to meet her for lunch, just as friends. So I went, because I thought that was the right thing to do. But she wanted us to continue and started going on about how she might even be pregnant.’

She wanted us to continue
. The
us
stings. I let out a moan and Sandy grabs my hands and squeezes them so tight it hurts.

‘I told her not to be ridiculous,’ he says. ‘And it was ridiculous. It was only a few days after . . . and I’d been drunk, but I’d used a condom. I’m not that stupid.’

‘Yet you ran to her when she called you in Ireland. You believed her then.’

‘I didn’t know what to think. She said the condom must have been faulty. All I knew when she phoned was that I had to go and talk to her and find out what was happening. I think she already knew she wasn’t pregnant when she called you.’

*

We talk about our childless marriage and whether it might have been very different had we been honest with each other about what we’d wanted and what we’d feared.

When we first got together, I was curious about his first wife and how I compared with her, but over time I stopped thinking about her. Everything was about Sandy and me. Now, though, I want to know and understand more. Had childlessness been a choice for her, or for both of them? Or was it simply that they hadn’t got round to having children? And had Sandy discovered at the age of fifty-one that the prospect of becoming a father had exposed a desire he never imagined he would feel?

‘I don’t remember Elizabeth and I ever talking about kids. I suppose we might have had a couple, if we’d stayed together, but we were young and completely focused on our careers,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really think consciously about kids until I met you.’

‘Not consciously enough that you ever actually talked about kids in a serious way with me,’ I say. ‘So why Julia? Did you sit down and talk about kids with her? I won’t be cross if you tell me the truth. I just want to know what it was about her that made her so irresistible.’

He throws his hands up in a helpless gesture. ‘She was . . . lively and good fun. Most of the men fancied her like mad and I suppose I was flattered that she was interested in me.’

‘You’re a complete fuckwit.’

‘I know.’

There’s something else I want to know. Why he came back to me that first time.

‘I missed you. And . . . you needed me.’

I persist with another question, over and over again. ‘If we’d had a child, children, do you think you would have had an affair with Julia?’

His answer is always the same. ‘I don’t know.’

But we talk in short bursts, because neither of us is capable of sustaining such openness for long, so we talk about other things. He tells me he has been offered a job in Dublin.

‘Are you going to take it?’

‘I don’t know. It depends on you.’

‘When did this Dublin offer come?’ I ask.

‘A few months ago. When we were still apart. Well, it wasn’t really an offer, then, just an approach. To check whether I might be interested.’

‘And were you?’

‘At the time, not very. But that was . . .’

I finish his sentence for him: ‘. . . when you were still with Julia.’

‘Look, I wasn’t with her all the time. I was just seeing her occasionally. It wasn’t what you’d call a relationship. But that wasn’t the reason. I didn’t see any point in leaving London and it was all very much up in the air. Now they’ve come up with an offer and I’ve said I’ll think about it.’

‘Why? Is it because of the job itself or because you think it’s what I would like?’

‘The job’s a senior one. It wouldn’t be much different from what I’m doing now. But it might be good for both of us. We’d be starting again.’

It’s not an unattractive idea. We could sell or rent out the London flat and buy something in Dalkey or Killiney, or in Howth, on the other side of Dublin Bay. We’d be close to the city and close to the sea and the mountains. I could teach there, too. It would take a bit of effort to establish myself, but maybe that would be a good thing, to have time to get used to such big changes.

I never thought I’d return to Ireland and now the possibility that I might, that both of us might move there, frightens me as much as it excites me.

But what if we can’t repair our marriage and we drift apart, though? At least in London I would have most of the life I’ve built up over the years. I would have Ursula. Being alone in Dublin would be hard. As part of a couple, I might be able to form new friendships, but as a woman in her forties and on her own – that’s something I don’t want to think about. And I’m not in the mood for final decisions now, for giving a definite yes or no to anything.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t think about that now,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t think about anything right now. It’s too soon.’

There’s already an autumn chill in the night air and, when I open the windows, a resinous smell insinuates its way into the flat from the trees in the communal gardens at the back. It was around this time last year that Sandy walked out. I could take him back and try to write off the year that has passed. But I’m not ready to forgive him and I’m not sure I ever will be, because every time I think about a future with him, I also think of him with Julia, imagine their bodies in a tangle of physical desire, and my stomach feels as if shards of glass are flying around inside it. I don’t know whether I will ever be able to trust him again.