Plan B (26 page)

He would not be able to tell Jo that she had come to the house. So he would be lying again already.

Jo had been amazed at Emma.

‘You cheat on me with
her
?’ she had demanded, last Monday morning in the Aroma café on Piccadilly. ‘You throw away everything we’ve got to set up an extra home with some mumsy little woman who wouldn’t say boo to a goose? You only went after her because she was Pete’s Emma and you wanted to get one over on him. You could at least have picked a nubile teenage model.’

Hugh had been tempted to assure Jo that he had cheated on her with plenty of other women too, not just with Emma, and that some of them had undoubtedly been teenagers and very nubile, but he had managed to censor himself.

‘Don’t you like her?’ he’d asked, for want of anything else to say.

‘Of course not. I hate her but it’s not her fault. She’s sweet. She has no fucking idea what she’s got into, has she? She has not got a clue that you’re married, that you’re called Hugh, that you have a large and forceful family. I would say she’s clearly stupid, but you fooled me too.’

Hugh had known this was his moment to try to salvage something. ‘Josie,’ he had said, ‘I’m so sorry. I really am. More sorry than I can ever tell you. I got into this thing with Emma without meaning to, really. I suppose it flattered my ego that she was so keen. I was about to break it off when Alice came along and I just felt I couldn’t.’

She had agreed, against all judgement, that they would stay in the house together for a month and see what happened. Hugh knew what was happening. He decided to save them all some pain, and bail out.

He took out his usual travelling bag from its place under the bed, and he filled it with as many of his clothes as he could squash in. He added a few toiletries, and took down a painting from Olly’s wall and laid it flat on top of everything else.

Then he left.

I drove through a thunderstorm to get home from Bordeaux airport. I was not a confident motorway driver at any time, and I had never had to drive for any distance in conditions like these. I slowed right down and concentrated on the road ahead. It was an effective distraction. Huge raindrops splashed heavily onto the motorway in front of me. Even with the wipers on full throttle, I could barely see past my windscreen.

I crawled along the ring road in the slow lane. Lorries passed by, driving too fast, and splashed the car with dirty water. I was blinded whenever this happened. I was barely moving when the thunder clapped directly overhead, and the road was suddenly brightly lit by electricity. At the same instant, the car started shaking. All four wheels seemed to come off the ground and crash back down. I knew at once that a truck had smashed into me. I knew I was seconds from death.

The impact never came. I did not find myself crushed in twisted metal. The accelerator responded to my foot. I inched over to the hard shoulder, put my hazard lights on, and rested my forehead on the steering wheel.

I thought that my car had been struck by lightning. I was all right, and the car was all right. I was shaken. I had been holding myself together by a thread and now I didn’t think I could do it any more.

I had to keep going. I had to drive through this rain to get to Alice. It would pass soon. I guessed that the hard shoulder was a bad place to be in such poor visibility. The rain was coming down in torrents. All I could see of the lorries that were passing were blurry red tail lights. I knew that I was all but invisible.

I indicated and pulled tentatively back onto the road. When I came to the exit signed ‘Villeneuve’, I was relieved, because the traffic was much lighter, but it was still the motorway, and I was still miles and miles from Alice. After half an hour of inching along nervously, I was frustrated that the rain had not let up. A sign for petrol loomed up at me, and I pulled in gratefully, found a parking space beside the café, and phoned home.

Alice sounded fine. I had only been away overnight and she seemed barely to have noticed. She and Bella were sheltering from the rain, watching through the windows as sheets of pink lightning illuminated the valley. I had not been away for long, yet the world had changed. I felt that I was observing myself from a distance. I picked up my tatty handbag, and ran through the rain into the welcoming glow of the café. I was not the only one sheltering there. It was a small room, full of travellers. I looked round at the men and women, smoking, drinking, and passing the time. The windows had steamed up and the staff were busy stoking up the coffee machine.

I bought a large white coffee, which was much smaller than a small coffee from Starbucks, but at least as powerful, and found a high stool in a corner by the window. I looked out at the water that was sweeping down the window. I was stranded. The strange feeling overtook me again. Mummy, I whispered. I want Mummy. I tried to imagine myself making this journey with Sarah, my mother. She would be fifty-four, younger and more relaxed than Christa. She would probably have made fun of Christa for being so uptight. Sarah and I would have sat here and laughed at the rain. She would have put an arm round my shoulder and told me it was all going to be all right. I would be fine, because I had her to look after me.

In a practical sense, living without Matt was going to be easy. We were used to having a part-time husband and father. I was trying to absorb the fact that he had been doubling up as a part-time husband and father to another family. I had never known him at all. The gentle, caring soul mate I had adored had been a figment of my imagination. I tried to stop myself revisiting scenes from the past four years, but I could not help re-evaluating every missed plane, every unavoidable birthday absence and its accompanying mortified phone call, in the light of the truth.

I took Sarah’s letter out of my handbag. I did not need to read it again. Touching it was enough. I tried to hold on to the fact that she had loved me. The one person who had really loved me had died.

Alice and I were accustomed to being a unit of two. We would get on all right without him. It was the rejection that I could not bear. I was humiliated, discarded, second best. His words sounded in my head, far too often.
You’ve always been the other
. I had never been The One. Now I knew why I had only ever met one of his friends. I was sure I had only met Pete because he had introduced us and so it had been unavoidable. Now I knew why Matt had told me that he didn’t have any family. I remembered Pete looking at me, a day ago, and telling me that he was sorry. He must have laughed at Matt’s escapades over the years. He had probably enjoyed it all along, knowing that I was going to be hurt.

I was mortified by the knowledge that Pete, the former Po, had known about Matt’s real identity. Whenever I had seen him, he had betrayed no unease at all. I imagined him laughing at my delusions of security. I wanted to curl up and die. I had never thought of myself as a bad judge of character. I had flattered myself by assuming that I was perceptive. I started to wonder what else had been going on beneath my nose without my realising it.

I wondered if I would ever be able to think of Matt as Hugh. I didn’t think so. I wondered if one day I would go from one month to another without thinking of him at all.

I tried to see through the steamed-up, wet window. The car park outside was almost dark. Sheets of rain distorted my view. Cars pulled in, their lights illuminating the millions of raindrops that continued to pound down. The air indoors was hot and the window was almost opaque with condensation as more and more people hurried in to shelter from the storm. I drained the dregs of my coffee and asked for another. A dark-haired man took the stool next to mine. A skinny older woman in magenta lipstick stood on my other side. I forced a smile at each of them and we exchanged pleasantries. The man announced that, according to his car radio, the storm was destroying houses all over the south-west. We shook our heads and agreed that it was terrible.

I stared out of the window and hoped that I didn’t have to talk any more.

I was not sure that I was strong enough. I didn’t think I could manage to be on my own all the time. I had no partner and I had no mother. Both of them had chosen to leave me. No one loved me best except Alice, and that was only because she was two, and anyway she preferred her father. She would go to live with him as soon as she was old enough to make that decision.

I could not bear it. I didn’t know whether to go back to England or whether to stay in France. Either way, I could barely see a future. I realised I was crying, silently.

The unisex toilet was basic but it looked clean enough. I locked the door and leaned back on it. The sobs came faster and stronger. I had always prided myself on self-control, and now I could do nothing but cry. I cried for my stupid mother, who had put her mania above everything else, including me. I cried for Matt, and for Alice. I cried for myself, and even for Jo and Oliver. The whole world was miserable. I felt desperate for some sort of comfort. There was nothing. I wanted to scream with pain, so I did. I did not care who heard me. I shook with the sobs, glad that there was a tempest outside. I could not control myself any more. I gasped for breath. I had only ever lost control like this once before, when I was in labour.

I slid onto the floor and curled up into a ball, hiccuping and trembling, all dignity gone.

I did not get home. Someone started knocking on the loo door, since it was the only one serving the establishment and I found myself having to unlock it and face the public. The man who had sat at the stool next to me was standing on the other side of the door. When he saw me he looked astonished, then sympathetic. He ushered me to the bar, propelling me by the elbow when I hesitated, and bought me an alcoholic drink. It was some sort of spirit. I didn’t even notice what. It felt warm as it slid down my throat.

I looked at my rescuer. He was about forty, dark-haired, and he looked very French. He had a kind face, as a certain type of Frenchman invariably does. It was lined, but with gentle, happy lines, as if he had spent most of his life smiling. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

‘
Madame
,’ he said, ‘
Ça ira
.’ It will be all right. It also translated as ‘It will go’. I let him buy me another drink. I was not embarrassed. I was a long way beyond embarrassment. I had spent my whole life worrying about what other people thought of me. It had been a waste of time. I was, instead, mortified at the realisation that I should have been looking at this man as a potential partner, as a mate. I didn’t want to be single. I didn’t want to have to look at strangers in that way. It was horrible, animal, beyond me.

‘
Merci
,’ I told him. I summoned my strength and did my best to project self-control. I put down my empty glass, making a steady effort to stop my hand trembling. Matt, Alice and I had been an exclusive unit. Perhaps we had been a little too exclusive. We had had lots of acquaintances, but few people had made it to the inner circle. We had been all that we had needed. Apart, of course, from Matt’s other family. He, apparently, had needed another wife and another child as well. We had been the spare ones. So it was just Alice and me who were cut off from the world. Our life was going to change radically in ways I could not imagine.

I put a smile on my face, pushed my stool back, and walked out of the café door, back into the rain. I walked slowly to the car, letting my hair fall into drenched rat’s tails. My so-called raincoat proved unequal to the task. It was merely decorative, I decided, as my clothes were slowly soaked.

When I reached the car, I stood still for a moment. The rain was letting up a little, and the sky was clearing. There were so many cars in the car park that it was going to be hard to manoeuvre myself out. I could not drive anywhere. I would drive into a ditch. I opened the door and sat at the wheel for a while, watching the drops hitting the windscreen. I put the radio on and listened to Nostalgi. They were playing ‘Pretty Woman’. I hummed along for a while, then I flipped down the sun shield and looked at myself in its mirror. I was anything but a pretty woman. My face was purple and blotchy. I looked terribly ill. My eyes were slits. Everything was puffed up and stained with crying. No wonder everyone had stared at me in there. Frenchwomen never looked like this.

I supposed some Frenchwomen must have done, from time to time. It was too easy to see France and the French largely as stereotypes. Coco was, of course, well dressed and chic, but so was Bella and she was British. Many of the other mothers I saw at the school gates were dressed in any old thing, just like me. Frenchwomen were just women, and Frenchmen were just men. Many of them had mistresses, just like Matt. In fact, they were renowned for it. I hated the fact that I had been a long-term mistress. I wondered how stupid I must have been, not to have realised. How wilfully blind I had been. I wondered why.

The rain became heavier again. I took out my mobile. The network flickered on and off. I tried calling home anyway, but it rang once before reception disappeared. I looked at myself again. I had just enough presence of mind to see that I was in pieces. I could not drive home through the rain. I would probably die. I reversed out of my parking space and drove around the buildings to a sign saying ‘Hotel’.

It was a chain hotel; cheap and efficient. My room was small, and it smelt of stale cigarette smoke. I sat on the bed and tried to pull myself together. First of all, I regulated my breathing.

Then I ran a deep, hot bath and tried to comfort myself with platitudes. It would be all right, I told myself, echoing the man in the café. I tried the concept out. It was going to end up all right. People went through the process all the time. Not, perhaps, exactly the same, not the discovery that their life partner was essentially a bigamist, but relationships that had been supposed to last for ever did go wrong, and they went wrong every day. People deceived each other. Lots of people were divorced. They had all been through this heartache.

And lots of people lost their mothers. Many children grew up motherless. My situation was nothing special; it was just part of the human condition.