Miss You (41 page)

‘Why can’t?’ Bella asked, not unreasonably.

‘Girls,’ I intervened. ‘Why don’t you take it in turns?’

Nash suddenly stood up.

‘I’ve had it with you being such a bloody pain, Flora! You be Peter Pan and Bell be Tinkerbell for a change!’

I don’t know if it was the swear word that shocked my elder daughter, or just the novelty of someone telling her off, but she drew back, chastened, and Bella was allowed to whizz around
ding-a-linging until she became quite breathless.

‘Flora has too much of it,’ Nash said.

I felt I’d been reprimanded.

‘And Bell’s got to learn to stick up for herself,’ she added.

‘Yes. You’re right.’

‘You don’t want her getting bullied when she goes to nursery, do you?’

‘No.’

Was this how bullying started, I thought, with the parents’ tacit permission? I needed to be more aware of it.

‘What will you do then?’ Nash asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘God, you’re hopeless! Do you mind if I make a suggestion? Go to cookery school.’

‘They cost the earth.’

‘Well then, get a job in a restaurant for the lunch service, or something. There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant just down the road from you. Why don’t you talk to the chef?
I’m sure you could come up with some sort of quid-pro-quo arrangement, like a kind of apprentice. You used to be a waiter, didn’t you?’

‘Charlotte couldn’t cope with me waiting tables.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Nash, exasperated. ‘You always give the impression that your wife’s disappointed in you!’

I wasn’t aware that I gave any impression of Charlotte. I avoided talking about my marriage with Nash.

‘She
is
disappointed in me,’ I said.

‘So what are you two doing together?’ Nash demanded. ‘I just can’t see it. What do you have in common?’

‘We both put our children’s interests first,’ I said. I’d always had the tendency to sound pompous when cornered. ‘You’d understand if you had kids of your
own,’ I added, making it worse.

‘Oh, don’t give me that shit! I know perfectly well what it’s like to be the child of parents who hate each other, thank you very much.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Don’t always be sorry,’ said Nash. ‘Hangdog is one of your least attractive looks.’

‘Charlotte and I don’t hate each other, by the way.’

It was ironic that I said it on the very day that Charlotte informed me she was having an affair.

I’d suspected something because her conference weekends had become increasingly frequent. For some reason I’d envisaged him as younger than her, another student doctor, possibly, in
a leather jacket, with longish hair, oozing sexual energy. I was, as usual, completely wrong, because he was considerably older than Charlotte, bald and big in pharmaceuticals. His name was
Robert.

‘Where did you meet?’ I asked.

Charlotte was sitting on the opposite sofa in our downstairs room studiously avoiding eye contact.

‘At the theatre. He stepped in that snowy night you let me down,’ she said. ‘Obviously, it didn’t start straight away.’ She finally looked at me.

How long
had
it taken? I felt it would be ungentlemanly, somehow, to ask.

‘So, why are you telling me now?’

‘Well,’ said Charlotte, as casually as if she were outlining her plans for the day, ‘the thing is, Robert wants us to go and live in Switzerland with him.’

‘Us?’ For a moment, I crazily thought that she was including me in this arrangement.

‘The girls like him. He likes the girls.’

‘Hang on! The girls don’t even know him!’

‘They do, actually.’

Now Charlotte stared down at the floor.

‘That week in Majorca,’ she mumbled.

Charlotte had taken the girls to see her mother in Majorca by herself, claiming that it was so rare for her to spend quality time with them. I’d stayed at home to redecorate the
children’s bathroom, which was becoming a little mouldy and wasn’t good for Bella’s asthma. When the girls came back full of the things they’d done with Robert, I’d
assumed that they meant Charlotte’s stepfather Robbie. How very convenient for Charlotte that the names were so similar.

Had she brought him along on their trips to see my mother too? Had Charlotte asked them to lie to me?

‘That’s the only time,’ Charlotte said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I’m sorry I lied, but it was the only way I could think of testing the arrangement without
raising the emotional stakes.’

‘Quite right. Couldn’t have anyone getting emotional,’ I said.

‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,’ Charlotte replied.

‘So your mother’s given this Robert her stamp of approval, has she?’ Somehow it was more humiliating to know that other people had been in on the conspiracy.

‘Yes, she has. Not that that particularly matters to me.’

What did matter to her? What had ever mattered to her? I stared at my wife, as if seeing her for the first time: a very attractive woman in her mid-thirties, at the peak of her career. I was no
closer to knowing what was going on in her head than I had been the day we first made love in her attic room in the rooftops. Had it all been a sham? Or just the last couple of years?

‘Well, I’m sorry to upset your carefully worked-out, emotion-free plans, but I won’t agree to it,’ I told her. ‘I won’t allow you to take the girls
away!’

‘I don’t actually see that you have a choice,’ said Charlotte. ‘How would you look after them on your own?’

‘I’ll get a job!’

‘And an au pair, because you’d have to work all the hours God sends to keep up the mortgage payments? That’s if anywhere will have you, with your work record!’

‘We’ll have to downsize.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but prices are going up.’

‘We’ll have to live somewhere outside London, then. People do, you know.’

I could hear myself speaking as if I was another person listening to me, and everything I said sounded lame.

‘You might be prepared to let the girls descend to your reduced circumstances, but I’m not. And I’m their mother. Who do you think the courts will back?’

‘You’d be prepared to put them through a custody battle, would you?’ I desperately tried to regain the moral high-ground.

‘If you choose to fight me, you’ll be the one doing that,’ she countered.

I found myself thinking that she could have been a lawyer. She had the cool, analytical brain for it. And then it dawned on me that she must have already talked to one. Robert probably had a
legal team at his disposal. Charlotte had rehearsed every argument and I was at a total disadvantage. Perhaps I should ask for time out to prepare my own defence? I would call Marcus. In our
unspoken competition, I’d now be the first cuckold, the first to get a divorce, the first to fight a custody battle.

‘If we’d been a normal family, you wouldn’t have seen them so much during the week, would you?’ Charlotte reasoned, moderating the sharpness of her tone.

A normal family. That’s what I’d wanted us to be. Had I let everyone down?

‘Where in Switzerland?’ I asked.

‘Geneva,’ she said. ‘Robert has a house with a view of the lake.’

About six months ago, there had been a conference there, I remembered. Or had there? Was that another convenient coincidence, or another lie?

‘Have you got a job there?’ I wanted to know.

‘I’ve had various offers, but I’m not in a hurry. The girls will be my first priority.’

‘That’ll make a change,’ I said, acidly.

‘I haven’t really had a choice, have I?’ she snapped.

‘I can’t see the advantage for the girls,’ I said, realizing that the only argument I had a chance of winning was one about their future.

‘There’s an international school just a block away. Bella won’t know any different. Flora is very adaptable, as we know.’

I took this to be a reference to the fact that Flora attended a state school rather than a private one, which Charlotte would have preferred if we could have afforded it.

‘It’s a good time for them to move,’ she added.

That was inarguable. If they were going to move, better when they were young, before they had established relationships with friends and teachers.

‘Geneva’s a fantastic place to grow up. They’ll speak several languages, meet fascinating people. Robert’s a count, actually, though he doesn’t really use his
title.’

‘I thought Switzerland was a republic?’

Charlotte stiffened.

‘He also has a chalet in Austria,’ she said.

‘You’re not thinking of letting them ski?’

‘You can’t stop them having a full life just because of your guilt,’ Charlotte said. The ghost of a smile swept across her face, as if she tasted victory.

‘It’s not guilt, it’s rational fear – skiing’s dangerous, remember!’

I pictured my brother hurtling through the whiteness, glancing back over his shoulder to see if I was catching him up.

It was fear. But it
was
guilt too. We both knew it, although we’d never mentioned it in all the years we’d been together. Did Charlotte hold me responsible like my mother did?
Had she been holding a knife behind her back all this time, waiting for the moment to stick it into my gut?

Is this your revenge, Ross?

How had I ever imagined that I would get away with taking his girlfriend? How could I have thought that I deserved my beautiful daughters?

‘Nobody
has
to ski,’ I said moronically.

And then suddenly I started crying. I hadn’t cried since I was thirteen. In my first term at public school, I’d learned how to keep it back because crying was for wusses. Now I was
choking with tears, as if the reservoir of emotion that I’d dammed up for so long was all pouring out of my eyes and nose and mouth in a great, wet, drowning flood.

At one point, I felt a soft, tentative pat on my back and I shouted ‘Get off!’ so violently, Charlotte snatched her hand back, as if from a live wire.

She waited until my shoulders finally stopped heaving, then handed me a tissue.

‘You’ll still see them,’ she said, emollient now, as if collapse signalled my defeat. ‘Geneva’s only an hour and a half’s flight. It really won’t be
very different, except you’ll be the one who has them at weekends . . .’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I said, snorting back the tears, suddenly coldly determined. ‘They’re far too young to fly to London every weekend.’

‘Well, once a month, then,’ she said.

The terms were already worsening.

‘Don’t you think we ought to see how the girls feel about this?’ I suddenly asked.

Charlotte was visibly taken aback, as if I’d lobbed a fast ball at her head. I could tell it was a scenario she hadn’t anticipated and I could almost see her brain racing through the
calculations, acknowledging it would be unreasonable to deny them a say.

‘Let’s speak to them in the morning,’ I pressed. ‘They’ll have the whole weekend to ask questions.’

‘OK, but we must all be together,’ said Charlotte, anxious to get the ground rules established. ‘And we have to keep it simple, no pressure . . . we’ll say something like
“Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but—”’

‘But that’s not true, not for me . . .’ I interrupted.

Charlotte looked at me impatiently, as if I was unnecessarily trying to complicate things.

So I missed the opportunity to ask if, as her words had implied, she’d once loved me too, and tormented by that, and by all the questions Flora and Bell might come up with, I stayed awake
most of the night until eventually succumbing to sleep in the pale chill of dawn.

I was woken by the smell of toast. Charlotte and the girls were already sitting at the table when I raced downstairs bleary and dishevelled.

‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ said Charlotte, making the girls giggle.

‘Shall we have pancakes?’ I said, attempting to recover lost ground, adding, when Charlotte shot me a glance, ‘We often have pancakes at weekends when you’re
away.’

How unusual it was for the four of us to be together, I thought, my brain still raw and hollow from crying. Was Charlotte’s claim that it wouldn’t be so very different actually
right? I poured myself a cup of coffee from the cafetière.

‘We have something to tell you,’ Charlotte said brightly, then looked at me.

I tried to remember the exact wording we’d agreed.

‘Mummy is going to live with her friend Robert,’ I began.

‘One of the reasons is that I want to spend more time with you two,’ Charlotte interjected, which sounded like pressure to me.

‘The thing is, we both love you so much that we both want you to live with us,’ I said, hating the speed at which it was all coming out. I looked across the table, expecting tears,
but the children appeared only slightly curious as they spooned their cereal.

‘Are you getting divorced?’ asked Flora. It was a condition she was quite familiar with because several of her friends’ parents were separated.

I looked at Charlotte.

‘In due course,’ she said.

What were a seven- and three-year-old supposed to take from that?

‘You can stay living here with me just as we are now, if you like,’ I said.

‘Or live with me in Robert’s house,’ said Charlotte, glaring at me.

‘I want to stay with Daddy!’ shouted Bella immediately, as if it was some lovely sleepover we were talking about.

My heart felt as if it would burst with love, and a smile broke over my face like sunshine.

‘What’s Robert’s house like?’ asked Flora coolly.

‘Well, it’s very big and it’s got a swimming pool,’ said Charlotte.

‘That’s not fair,’ I muttered.

‘Would you prefer me to lie?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Does it have a garden?’ Flora wanted to know.

‘An enormous garden.’

‘Has it got swings?’ Bella now chimed in.

‘It’s not as good as Kensington Gardens . . .’ I countered, desperately.

‘Why can’t you take it in turns?’ Flora suddenly beamed, as if she’d hit on the obvious solution.

‘We
will
be taking it in turns,’ said Charlotte, her brain more alert than mine to the possibility of breaking the impasse. ‘The only thing we need to decide is which
place you’ll go to school. Bella will be starting school soon, won’t you, darling?’