Tangled Lives (29 page)

She shut the door of the dishwasher carefully, pulling off the rubber gloves and laying them over the edge of the sink.

‘No, he hasn’t, but it’s not just Daniel. I don’t know …’ She couldn’t articulate the mess that churned around her brain, didn’t even want to try.

‘Let’s go up,’ he was saying, holding out his hand to her. ‘I’ll run you a bath and we can get an early night.’

Later, as they lay in bed, Richard reached for her, letting his hand gently stroke her bare shoulder. She didn’t move, but he must have taken this as a signal, because he leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Don’t push him off. What’s wrong with you? You know you love him. But she felt so tight inside, wound up like a clock, holding on … to what she didn’t know.

‘Please, Richard, don’t … I can’t.’

He drew back, his face neutral. But his hand still rested on hers. ‘Let me hold you at least, Annie,’ he said, pulling her over until she rested in the crook of his arm, her head on his bare chest. ‘We all need cuddles.’

For a while they lay in silence and she found some comfort in his embrace, a slow, almost imperceptible letting go in what she knew to be a place of safety. He reached and turned off the light.

‘I’m so sorry if I let you down over Daniel,’ she heard
Richard say softly. ‘I’ve been a worse brat than my son, and with less excuse.’

She didn’t know what to say.

‘But I thought I’d lost you, lost the Annie I knew. It was pathetic, I admit that. But I couldn’t cope. Not with Daniel, and certainly not with that Carnegie man.’

She could still hear the edge of jealousy, which he was obviously struggling to control.

‘It’s not as if I’ve behaved rationally either.’ She thought of Charles and winced. Do
not
tell him; Jamie’s ringing command echoed in her brain. She looked over at the shadow of his profile. ‘I thought I was losing you altogether, not just the Richard I used to know.’

She heard Richard swallow. ‘Yes, well … at one stage …’

The sleepy, almost tender mood in the room changed in an instant, as if sparked up by a bolt of lightning. That tone, that’s what he sounded like on the bench by the sea that night, when he looked so distressed. She sat upright.

‘At one stage? What do you mean?’

She turned the bedside light back on. Richard was still lying flat on his back, his hands clasped across his chest. He reached for his glasses and slowly pulled himself up against the wooden headboard. He wouldn’t look at her.

‘Richard?’

He sighed heavily, the long breath out sounding unnaturally loud. Her heart was hammering.

‘Annie … you’re not going to like this, but I … I
really have to tell you something. I didn’t want to, but we shouldn’t have secrets, should we, not after all we’ve been through.’ He paused but she found she couldn’t speak to urge him on as she wanted. ‘I … I had sex … with someone else.’ The words seemed dragged by force from somewhere deep within him.

‘Kate.’

He looked surprised. ‘Kate?’ Then horrified. ‘Kate at the office? God, no! She’s a child.’

She waited. So not Kate then. She felt sick.

‘The lawyers hired an expert in Belgian tax law because of this merger … and this woman came over for a couple of days …’

‘When you stayed out all night? Saying you were at Andrew’s?’

He shook his head. ‘No, this was weeks ago … before Cornwall. The night you saw Carnegie the second time. I tried to tell you, but that Morag woman interrupted us and then I just couldn’t.’ His expression was abject.

All this time, when I was beating myself up about Daniel, he was off shagging a Belgian tax expert?

‘So this has been going on all summer?’

Again, he looked horrified. ‘No … no, Annie, of course not. It was just once. I was drunk, we’d worked really late and I walked her back to her hotel … it meant nothing, absolutely nothing.’

‘What’s her name?’ she asked, without knowing why. What the hell do I care what she’s called?

‘Marie. She was …’

‘What? What was she, Richard? Good in bed?’

She saw him wince. ‘Don’t.’

‘Well, was she … better than me?’

He reached for her hand but she slapped him off. The bastard, the bloody, bloody bastard. Her whole body, every single cell, was alight with rage.

‘Why are you telling me this now, Richard? In fact, if it was only one night and meant nothing, why are you telling me at all?’

‘I thought … it’s been tormenting me. I feel so guilty. It was such a terrible thing to do. I thought I owed it to you to be honest. No more secrets.’

She heard Jamie’s words again: You’re just trying to absolve your guilt – and her own betrayal came back to her with sharp, uncomfortable clarity. I’m going to tell him about Charles. Why not? Why should she suffer, imagining her husband crawling all over that woman’s body and let him off scot free? He’s already jealous of Charles – it’ll hurt and it serves him right!

‘You just want to be forgiven.’

He nodded. ‘Do you think you can … forgive me?’

‘You shouldn’t have told me. I didn’t need to know.’

She glared at him, Charles’s name on the tip of her tongue. But won’t he feel better if I tell him? Won’t it let him off the hook?

‘I was drunk, I promise to God, Annie, it meant nothing. I hardly remember it.’

Yeah, right, she thought, her mind reeling as she tried to take in what he was telling her. She heard him groan softly.

‘It was so difficult between us after Daniel turned up. You were—’

‘Don’t you dare start blaming Daniel for this. Or me. What you did was inexcusable.’

He didn’t reply.

‘So what if I was a pain to live with? We’re married, aren’t we? Married people do that to each other sometimes. It isn’t a bloody charter for you to go out and shag the first available bit of skirt. Cheating on me … just because I wasn’t paying you enough attention? And you made
me
feel so guilty. I thought you were drinking and being mean because I’d brought Daniel into the house, when in fact you were just suffering from a shed-load of your own guilt.’

‘I know … I know that.’

She could tell he was thoroughly contrite. She felt almost sorry for him. Almost. But I stopped, she thought. He didn’t. That’s the difference.

‘I think we’ve been lucky, you and me, with our marriage.’ He spoke softly as if he was nervous of being too confrontational. ‘It’s never been challenged before. Even when the work stuff was difficult and the children were small, we’ve always pulled together. Maybe we got complacent.’

She knew he was probably right. It had never entered her head that either of them could be unfaithful. And yet,
tempted by Charles and his playful seductiveness, she had been on the verge of succumbing.

She got up.

‘Where are you going? Annie, please … don’t go.’

‘I want to be on my own.’

‘But if you sleep in Marsha’s room, Lucy will know something’s up.’

She hesitated.

‘You’re not going to tell Ed and the girls, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not.’ She was suddenly too tired to do anything, and she sat back down on the bed. The thought of them knowing this about their father was too awful to contemplate. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t want him to comfort her. She wanted to hit him, but she knew she couldn’t. She wanted to indulge in the searing, uncomplicated pain of his betrayal, but she knew she didn’t have the right.

‘Annie?’ She heard his voice as if from a long way away.

‘Don’t speak to me.’ She lay down and turned her back to him, hearing his sorrowful sigh with stern indifference.

Jamie sat on Eleanor’s barely used divan, watching Annie as she stood by her mother’s chest of drawers holding a roll of black plastic bags.

‘Christ, darling … he waits nearly thirty years and then picks a Belgian tax inspector!’

‘Expert, not inspector. And it’s not funny.’

‘Well, it is a bit. I mean it’s not as if you weren’t just
as keen to get your leg over Chelsea Charlie, if Mother hadn’t intervened.’

She groaned. ‘Don’t start that again. No, I know. But still. It’s bloody upsetting.’

‘I’m sure it is, but not fatal.’

‘No, not fatal, I suppose,’ she conceded.

‘Did you sort it out?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really. Well, we’re speaking, sort of. So as not to upset Lucy. Although I think she’s given up on us being anything more than civil these days.’

She glanced nervously around the room. She’d been putting this day off; it seemed sacrilege to go through her mother’s things.

‘Creepy, isn’t it?’ Jamie followed her gaze and gave a theatrical shudder.

‘What if there’s private stuff, like diaries, letters, in here.’

‘You read ’em, darling! Well … perhaps not if it’s your mother. But I reckon you’re safe. Eleanor didn’t strike me as a reflective person exactly.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘No, I suppose not.’

Her mother’s clothes were all immaculately kept, each item encased in clear plastic pockets, neatly stacked; Mercedes’ work no doubt. There were the big knickers of the old; strange antique corsets; stockings rolled and bagged; piles of identical navy and cream silk polo-necks; elbow-length satin gloves from the fifties with buttons at the wrist; leather and gold-chain belts, all redolent of musty lavender, mothballs and another era. There was no sign
of any papers. Richard had taken a whole pile away from the drop-leaf desk in the study, but nonetheless, Annie opened each drawer gingerly, terrified she might stumble across some dark and unpalatable secret.

‘It’s sad,’ Jamie said, shaking the clothes free of their pockets so they could be taken in bin bags to the charity shop. ‘All this reminds us of her, of course, but it’s also strangely impersonal. This could belong to anyone really.’

The more the wardrobe and cupboards emptied, the more Annie began to agree. There’s absolutely nothing that’s even remotely personal to her here. No letters, cards, diaries (not even engagement diaries), photographs or albums – only yearbooks of the ‘finished’ girls from the school. No sign of the pictures her grandchildren had drawn her when they were little, or the crooked clay models and constructions made of egg boxes and loo rolls they had given her with such pride. She found a V&A Museum address book beside her mother’s chair in the drawing room, and on the rosewood table by the window were a few photographs in silver frames: her wedding to Ralph, Annie and Richard’s wedding, a group shot of the children in late childhood, faces from the summer ball, one of Eleanor with the Queen at a charity night.

‘Maybe she thought she was dying and chucked it all away,’ Jamie suggested.

But Annie was bemused. Everyone keeps things of sentimental value. Everyone except her mother, it seemed.

‘But she wasn’t ill. Shall I ask Mercedes? My mother would never have lugged the bin bags down to the basement on her own.’

‘Just seems so odd … to strip your life down to a few silk polo-necks. She must have been terrified of just this. You going through her things.’

Annie sat down on the bed. She felt so tired. And confused. Richard’s confession had shocked her to the core, it made little difference that she was hardly in a position to judge him.

Jamie was looking at her intently. ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

‘Have I?’ she said absentmindedly. ‘Maybe Mother just never cared about anything enough to keep it, Jamie. She just threw things away all the time.’

‘Poor Annie … did you hope you might discover some proof that she, I don’t know, loved you or something?’

She stared straight ahead. ‘Like what though?’

‘Not sure, but you hear of it, don’t you? Letters, stashes of mementos kept carefully in a drawer that reveal that the dead person really cared.’

She smiled. ‘You’ve been watching too many sci-fi soaps.’

‘I’m sure she loved you, Annie, in her own sweet – or in Eleanor’s case not-so-sweet – way. Surely you don’t need proof.’

But she did. Not necessarily that her mother had loved her, but who her mother was. She realised she had absolutely no idea. All she knew was Eleanor’s lifelong
imperative to appear in the right place at the right time, with the right people, dressed in the right frock, saying the right thing with the right accent and the ‘proper’ social values. What did Mother really feel about me? Or about Daddy … about life in general? Her cronies at the funeral had been effusive about what a ‘character’ she’d been, how no event was complete without her. Could Eleanor Westbury’s life really be reduced to her obsession with class and social status?

‘It’s all too late,’ she said bleakly. ‘We can speculate all we like, but we’ll never know for sure now.’

Jamie looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know you’re very loved, don’t you? And you know how to love other people,’ her friend stated firmly. ‘So somewhere along the line, you must have been shown how. That’s usually down to the parents, isn’t it?’

She hadn’t thought about this before.

‘I suppose you’re right … I do know how to love, although not always very successfully.’

Mercedes was in her mother’s study, packing into carrier bags the books Annie had said she didn’t want. The housekeeper, with her resolute Catholic faith in the decisions of the Almighty, had remained surprisingly cheerful during the dismantling of what had come to be her home over the last twenty years. With the money Eleanor had left her she was now able to get a small flat in the village in Murcia, southern Spain, where her daughter
and grandchildren lived, and perhaps that helped. Annie took a deep breath. Let’s hope she understands what I’m asking.

‘Mercedes, did my mother throw things away a lot recently?’ She mimed putting something in the wastepaper basket.

‘You need bag?’ Mercedes asked, reaching over for a roll of black plastic bags that sat on the desk.

‘No … no, I … my mother, she have clear-out? Papers and things?’ Annie unconsciously raised her voice in pigeon English, in the mistaken notion that volume equalled clarity. She opened the top drawer of the desk and mimed picking something up, tearing it in pieces, then chucking it in the bin. She heard Jamie sniggering behind her.

The Spanish woman looked concerned. ‘You lost something, Señora?
Ella nunca me deja abrir el escritorio, nunca
.’