The Godmother (31 page)

“No.”

“Are you sure, Tessa? Think. This is important.” She sounded desperate.

“What do you think he saw, Francesca?”

“I fucked up, I really fucked up. I was supposed to be ending it. I was. We'd walked around the park in the rain for hours talking, he only came in to dry off…”

I didn't dare speak.

“I was so lonely.” Francesca was crying now. “I couldn't be in the same room with any of them. Sometimes when Katie was dawdling as she always did, I would yank her by the arm, knowing it was going to hurt, but yanking her anyway. I was angry with myself for getting into this situation and taking it out on them—”

“Francesca, what did Caspar see?”

“I don't know, all I heard was the door slam.”

“What could he have seen?”

“Oh shit, I can't even say it…”

“Where were you?”

I heard Francesca take a deep breath. I said a silent prayer. A few of them. Not on the kitchen table. Nor the stairs. Or the floor, the sofa, up against the wall…There were too many prayers and I figured God wasn't particularly partial to hearing all of these rather sordid details. Adultery being one of his bugbears. The truth was there is no good position or place to catch your mother having sex with another man.

“Our bed,” said Francesca finally.

Better than on all fours on the sitting-room floor, I guess. I could not pretend I wasn't shocked. Me? After my friend Samira, I was the least prudish
person I knew. I was very careful with my next words, more careful even with how they sounded.

“OK, let's think about this rationally,” I said brightly.

“You're horrified, aren't you?”

“No.” Yes.

“Disappointed?”

“No.” A little. “You would have had your reasons—”

“I felt like someone had bricked up all my fire exits. I was suffocating. I couldn't get out.”

“Not a good time to go around lighting fires, then.”

Francesca sighed heavily. I didn't want to sound like a school mistress. I wanted to try and be a good friend. “You would have had your reasons and you can explain all of them if you like, but it's in the past, it happened, whatever. Let's concentrate on Caspar for now. He wasn't any different from when he got out of the car to when he came back in a few minutes later.”

“Are you sure?”

I thought hard. It was a long time ago, but I was fairly sure I would have noticed something. Caspar could not have witnessed what Francesca thought he had witnessed, then get back into the car as jovial as before. We went to get burgers as a treat. I remember where we went. I remember what we ate. And it was a lot. I can't imagine he'd have had much of an appetite if he'd seen anything.

“Did you hear him come in?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“We were making a lot of noise, he'd have heard something.”

I felt a bit queasy. That sort of detail made it all too real. I preferred talking around the issue.

“Why had we come back?” I asked. “I can't remember.”

“Some voucher for the War Museum.”

Of course. After the burgers we went and looked at a lot of killing machines that Caspar was fascinated with at the time. “Good memory,” I said.

“Not the sort of thing you forget. He had left them on the kitchen table. If only I'd seen them, but I hadn't—hadn't bloody clocked them sitting there.”

“If they were on the kitchen table he wouldn't have come upstairs.”

“Our clothes were all over the place.”

“Well, you're a fucking idiot.” It didn't make me feel any better, and I was pretty sure it made Francesca feel worse and I was sorry as soon as I'd said it, but the words just blurted out. We both sighed and for a little while neither of us said anything.

“That wasn't helpful,” I said.

“But honest.”

“At home, Francesca, why do it at home?”

“I didn't mean for it to happen. I would never have done it in our bed normally…”

“Like that makes it better?”

“No. I don't know. It felt like it made it better at the time. But we were at home, I was upset, I didn't want to end it. We're talking about a man with whom I risked everything I had, just to see him for half an hour. He was in my house. We were alone. I was trying to end it, I really was, but…”

“Don't tell me, one thing led to another.”

“A paltry excuse, right?”

“Always has been. Though I've used it myself when I've slept with undesirables.”

“You're allowed to sleep with undesirables,” said Francesca.

“True. But they're not good for my health.”

“That may be true, but that is your choice. I wasn't just going to hurt myself, I was going to break my family apart.”

“And that's why you think Caspar won't listen to you.”

“Lies to me, swears at me, has no respect for me. Frankly, being ignored would be easier to bear.”

“It doesn't make sense—why wait four years before punishing you?”

“Maybe he didn't realize what he'd seen.”

“Your son was twelve, not two.”

“Maybe he just blocked it out; that was why he could get back in the car as if nothing had happened.”

“Something doesn't wash. He told me about the erection he got every time his art teacher, Miss Clare, walked into the room; he'd have told me about
you. Maybe he got off on the whole thing…”

“Tessa!”

“Sorry. Trying to introduce a little light relief.”

“A Tessa King one-liner is not what I'm after here. This is serious.”

“Of course it's serious, but it's not the end of the world. You and Nick are still together.”

“Thank God.”

“And there hasn't been anyone else?”

“God, no. Though I can see how it happens, if you don't get caught; it's a slippery slope. You think you're going to be struck down for being unfaithful, that the world will end, so it's quite weird when you discover you're not—you can walk back into your marital home, put on the fishfingers as if nothing has happened, so why not do it again? Eventually, the secret becomes as delicious as the affair itself. We'd talk for hours about our life together—a cottage on a moor, a farm in Spain—it was all wonderful while it was still fantasy. But when I thought Caspar had seen…” I could hear Francesca fighting to control her breathing. “That's why fantasy is so alluring, no one gets hurt.”

“So what happened after Caspar left?”

“I realized what I was doing had hideous consequences. Caspar literally snapped me out of my reverie. I told my friend to leave immediately. I was beside myself. I sat by the phone waiting for you to call me to tell me Caspar had phoned his dad and it was all over, bar the shouting. My friend rang me every hour on the hour for the rest of that afternoon, most of the night and throughout the next day. I just let it ring and ring and ring. Finally, I went and dropped my phone in the river. I regretted it as soon as I'd done it and nearly followed suit, but I managed to drag myself home. I knew I would find it a darn sight harder to call him from home. Eventually, I stopped yearning for him; in fact, that was the weird thing. Here was someone I truly believed was the love of my life and within ten days I was fine.”

“Lust is a very powerful thing,” I said. “And being lonely can drive you to do terrible, stupid things.” My place on the moral high ground wasn't so firm either. “And things got better with Nick?”

“That's the strange thing, the affair sort of saved my marriage. I know, you're right. Maybe I say that to make myself feel better but Nick kind of
mended me. Maybe he thought I was ill, I certainly looked ill. My cough came back. He sent me to bed, took himself off, rented me videos and even picked the girls up from school. He saw me through my period of mourning so well that I started to look forward to him coming home to break the monotony of being depressed. Somehow we managed to find our way back to the corridor and one morning I woke up and realized it had all meant nothing. I had not loved this other man. The man I loved was Nick. What was so terrifying was that if Caspar and you hadn't come back that afternoon, I might never have had the willpower to end it, I would have broken up my family for nothing. Things with Nick and me got better. In the end, the only real casualty was Caspar. Apart from the hideous guilt I carry around with me.”

“Morning,” I said.

“What?”

“Caspar and I came back in the morning.”

“No, it was afternoon. We'd been out in the rain all morning. Didn't get back until, don't know, but later in the day.”

“Well, it wasn't early morning, but it was before lunch.”

“Couldn't have been.”

“It was. I remember it. Honestly, we sat in the car when he'd got the tickets and discussed either going to the museum first and then having a late lunch, or having an early lunch and then going to the museum. In the end we went for burgers then bombs.”

“I didn't see your car; I heard a car leave.”

“We definitely sat there for a while. He really wasn't in a state of anxiety. Maybe you were hearing things.”

“Footsteps on the stairs and a door slam? I don't think so.”

“You said yourself you didn't see the tickets on the kitchen table. We'd been and gone while you were mooning about the park. I promise you, it was the morning, eleven-thirty, twelve. No later than twelve.”

“We were in the park at twelve.”

“Well then, it wasn't Caspar—he didn't see anything, he isn't scarred for life and he isn't punishing you. I've said this from the beginning, this isn't your fault. Caspar is being an arsehole and he needs to sort it out.”

“There is no way he came back later?”

“No. We were together for the rest of the day.”

“So who was on the stairs, who slammed the door?”

“The cleaning lady?”

“Tessa, I am the cleaning lady.”

“Oh.” I paused, thinking. “Well, who else has keys?”

“No one.”

“Someone must, unless it was a burglar.” No. A burglar would have assessed the situation and scarpered. Or assessed the situation and taken everything he could have got his hands on from downstairs, knowing the lady of the house was otherwise occupied upstairs and unlikely to hear a thing. And then it dawned on me. Just as it did Francesca.

“Nick,” we said in unison. The only other person who had keys was Nick.

After that Francesca was inconsolable, so in the end I got in the car and drove to her house where we remained until the early hours of the morning, talking about whether a man could see his wife with another man and not only love her, but seemingly love her more. Several times I stopped her from ringing him. If it had been Nick, and we were still not absolutely sure that it had been, then he had decided, for reasons known only to himself, to keep quiet about what he'd seen, or heard. Instead of blowing up, walking out and making her pay, he had cared for his wife and helped her mend an imaginary broken heart, which had felt as real as a genuine broken heart at the time. All along he had known that it had not been the persistent cough that had floored her, but the end of an affair, and still he had taken her cups of tea in bed, run her bath, taken the kids off her hands and given her space. So my conclusion was this: Nick was a bigger man than I had ever thought him to be. He loved his wife more than I believed possible and she owed it to him to repay his silence with silence. Making a happy home would be thanks enough since that, I was beginning to learn, was a bloody hard thing to do.

Alternatively, there was a petty thief walking around with a photographic image in his head of Francesca and her mystery man going at it hammer and tongs and Nick was nothing more than another blissfully ignorant spouse. Personally, I started hoping it was the former. In all its weird complexities, I found Francesca's infidelity and Nick's subsequent forgiveness more encouraging and life-affirming than a meaningless shag that she somehow got away
with.

Of course, what neither scenario dealt with was Caspar and why he seemed intent on blowing holes in his young brain. I had drunk too much to drive home, so crawled into bed with Francesca and took the place of her cuckold husband.

Twenty-four seconds after hitting the pillow, two lithe, extremely wakeful creatures came and bounced on the bed.

“What the fu—”

“Morning, girls,” said Francesca brightly, cutting me off.

“What bloody time is it?” I squinted at my watch.

“Well done, you two,” said Francesca, inexplicably.

“Well done? Well done for what? It's still dark outside.”

“For waiting until seven.”

“Seven!”

“We've been up since six, we waited and waited—”

“Poppy nearly came in.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

“DID NOT!”

“Don't shout, Poppy.”

“And she spilled the cornflakes.”

“Didn't!”

“Don't tell tales, Katie,” said Francesca patiently.

I fell back on the pillow and groaned. Since when had their voices got so unbearably squeaky?

“Welcome to my world,” whispered Francesca, peeling the duvet off her and stepping back into the clothes she'd removed only a few hours earlier. “Right, everybody, what are we up to today?”

“BALLET!” shouted Poppy.

“OK, ballet kit, in the airing cupboard.”

“Gym,” said Katie.

“Borrow one of Poppy's shirts, I haven't had time to clean yours.”

“Nooooo,” shouted Poppy.

“It's too small. I look like a boy in it,” Katie complained.

“You don't.”

“I do.”

“I have to take something for ‘show and tell.' Something I cooked,” said Poppy. Cooked? She's only five. Francesca swore quietly, but recovered quickly.