The One Before the One (21 page)

The room falls unbearably silent save for the rustle as Carr opens the golden envelope.

‘… RACHEL DELANEY FROM HUNTERHEWITT FOR HER CAMPAIGN WITH …’

I don’t hear the rest of it – it’s drowned out by applause and shrieks from Rachel’s table, anyway, where she is being mobbed by a throng of colleagues. She eventually breaks free and walks to the front. She’s wearing one of those trendy, body-con dresses, black with shimmering oyster-pink panels, which looks like you’re wearing your underwear on the outside. It clings to her perfect hourglass figure as she sashays onto the stage, her stacked heels showing off her toned, lean, calf muscles, her blonde hair pulled back tight to show off her cheekbones.

‘Is that Toby’s wife?’ I hear Charles say to Toupee Dom. ‘Well, she’s a
very
pretty girl, isn’t she? Hasn’t he done well?’

Nobody except Charles is clapping at our table; people are mumbling about the injustice of it all, ‘so unfair’, ‘better luck next time’. But the words are like the last bit of air escaping from a withering balloon, a tape running out of battery. And if I look at anyone I’ll cry, and I can’t cry here, I must
not
cry here. So I stare straight ahead, clapping a freeze-framed smile on my face.

Toby is nowhere to be seen.

* * *

Shona and Lexi are being so sweet, it’s unbearable. Despite my efforts to control myself, I am a mass of snot and tears, standing at the bar throwing vodka down my neck.

‘It’s not the fact I didn’t win,’ I’m snivelling between gulps of air.

‘We know it’s not,’ soothes Shona. ‘We know it’s not that.’

‘It’s just the fact he didn’t tell me – and he must have known – why didn’t he tell me?’

Shona grabs hold of my arms and makes me look at her. ‘Coz he’s a knob-end, darling,’ she says. ‘A total A grade cunt.’

Like I’ve said, you could always count on Shona not to mince her words and at that moment, like many more before them, I really loved her.

Lexi’s standing behind her, her eyes full of compassion and something else too – possibly fear. Poor kid. It must be like watching your mum lose it.

‘He probably knew it would be hideous, you being in the same room as, you know …’ Shona grimaces. ‘His
wife.’
Bless Shona. She’s trying so hard not to spell it out, not to bring up the small matter that she warned me this would happen; that I should have ended it yonks ago. ‘So he decided not to deal with it at all and just got wasted instead.’

‘Yeah, I reckon he’s been shitting himself about this for weeks,’ adds Lexi. ‘He was off his face before we even got here.’

I look up at them. Maybe they were right. Maybe this is why he didn’t turn up to the Malmaison last week, why he’s been so funny about this awards thing all along. It would kind of make sense.

Shona hands me a napkin and I blow my nose then throw it dramatically onto the floor.

‘Fucking hell, look at me! I’m like a cliché of the bad loser at a work awards do. Pissed and crying in a crap OTT dress.’

Shona rolls her eyes.

‘Now everyone’s going to think I’m crying because I didn’t bloody win. How embarrassing is that?’

Lexi folds her arms and sighs at me, all matter-of-factly.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ she says. ‘Janine’s done one. Probably gone home to defrost or something. Heather and Charles have disappeared for some heavy petting in a darkened corner and the rest of ’em are making far bigger tits of themselves than you could ever hope to, dancing to Phil Collins. So I reckon you’re all right.’

At that moment, I loved her, too.

Shona and Lexi go back downstairs and I wander off to the Ladies’ to try to bring some semblance of normality to my face.

I try Toby’s mobile again but really – what’s the point? He’s gone. Off his head somewhere. He doesn’t love me, and he probably never has, I just have to stomach it. So I’m standing in front of the mirror, phone clamped to my ear with one hand; the other wiping away mascara with a bit of tissue when a familiar face appears in the mirror next to me.

‘Hello, Caroline.’ She peers at me, just to check it is me. ‘Oh,
honey!’
The genuine compassion on Rachel’s face kills me. ‘Oh God, you’re not upset about …?’

‘What? God no!’ I force a laugh; this was
hideous.
‘No, no, just um … something else … PMT. Over-emotional. Drunk too much.’ She looks at me – so kindly, so genuine, I want to thump myself in my stupid swollen face and make it swell for a very long time.

‘So been there, honey,’ she says. ‘All a bit too much?’

I smile, weakly.
Just run now, Caroline. Make your excuses, leave now.

She goes into the toilet, reels off some toilet roll and hands it to me.

‘It’s all a fix anyway,’ she says. ‘All a load of bollocks,
these awards, that’s why Toby’s buggered off, he always hates these ceremonies.’

I dab at my face and look at her from blurry, tear-filled eyes.

‘Congratulations, anyway. You really deserved it,’ I say. ‘And I love your dress.’

She shrugs. ‘It’s just an old Top Shop number. Bit tight to be honest. Haven’t been able to eat all night.’

Why the hell did she have to be so nice?

‘Do you fancy a drink?’ she says. ‘Everyone from Hewitt’s is pissed out of their heads and I can’t really be bothered going back to our table.’

No, I think, no I do not. I want to turn around, run home, shut my door, drink my own weight in vodka, and not wake up for a week.

Two minutes later, we are sitting down with drinks.

She puts her hand on my arm. ‘Seriously, hun,’ she says. ‘I hope you’re not upset about the awards because I really couldn’t give a toss. This …’ she holds the award up. Some crap glass, pyramid-shaped thing. ‘It means bugger all, in the grand scheme of things.’

I take a large gulp of wine; if I was going to get through this I needed to be as drunk as her, if not more.

‘You’re very sweet,’ I say, ‘you’re really sweet. But it’s not that, really. I know it must look like that. You must think I’m a total sad case!’

‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘Actually, I really like you, Caroline. It’s official!’ she says, holding her glass up to chink with mine. ‘Toby was always going on about you and now I can see why.’

This was
hell.

‘I feel like you’re a woman’s woman, you know? Like I can tell you anything.’

I nod weakly.

‘And I’ll tell you why I don’t give a shit about this pap award and why you shouldn’t either,’ she says, taking another huge gulp of her wine. She was drunk; I could see that now, her pretty hazel eyes trying to focus on me. She smiles at me, sadly. ‘I lost a baby last week. Last Wednesday, I had a miscarriage. Kind of puts things in perspective …’

At first the facts don’t compute, my instincts are just to hug her – which I do, manically and tightly. But then slowly, like the horrid first moments of reality when you finally come to after a drunken, misspent night, all the bits fall into place. A baby. Their baby. My lover’s baby. I was fucking Toby when his wife was
pregnant? He was fucking me when he knew she was pregnant?
Like a wife driven mad with suspicion, riffling possessed through her husband’s wallet, I riffle through my memory. Last Wednesday. That was book club night. ‘Something came up,’ he said. Something came
up?
He was in hospital with his wife as she lost their baby – that’s what he calls ‘something came up’?

She doesn’t register my horror – course she doesn’t – she just keeps talking.

‘Basically, we’d been trying for ages …’ I’m watching her mouth move but I can’t hear the words. ‘I’m thirty-nine next month – I’m five years older than Toby – he’s my toy boy! Don’t know if he’s ever told you that?’

My head moves but my face is rigid.

‘I knew time was ticking when we got together and I’ve always wanted kids, it’s everything to me. So we were trying, we’d been trying for something like eighteen months and nothing, I’d begun to think that was it, forget it. We had tests, nothing came up, we were doing all the ovulation tests, I gave up drinking. Our sex life was basically reduced to me peeing on sticks and sticking my legs in the air after sex. Then it happened.’

‘When?’ It just shoots out. I’m still riffling through the memories, putting everything together.

She narrows her eyes.

‘Oh, well, sixteen weeks ago to be exact … Then, when I was away in Scotland on a business weekend and Toby was in Brighton – I called him because I’d started to bleed and I was terrified …’

I feel a trickle of sickening realization drip down my spine. Brighton. The hotel. The phone call he took from her whilst I was looking at my reflection in the bathroom mirror – it was all coming back to me. How jittery he was when he came off the phone, how he was desperate for sex, how he told me he
loved
me. When all the time it was guilt and fear driving him, and I was nothing more than a packet of cigarettes, a double shot of gin, something to relieve the anxiety.

She doesn’t stop talking.

‘As you can imagine, we were thrilled – well, I was thrilled – Toby, I don’t know, he’s gone off track a bit lately, and I worry I’ve pushed him into it.’

She could say that again. Poor Rachel. Poor, poor girl …

‘The bleeding stopped for a bit but then, last Wednesday morning, I started to get cramps and then to bleed really heavily and then …’

She stops, catches herself.

‘Sorry, you must think I’m insane, I’m sorry, like what is this pissed mad woman, oversharing with me for?’

‘No, no!’

‘It’s just I wanted you to know, even though I know you’re not upset about the award thing, that it truly means nothing to me. Truly, I couldn’t give a shit. I don’t care about work, I just want a baby, to be a family, to be happy. That’s what I’m getting at really. You know?’

‘Yeah, I do,’ I said, my eyes filling with tears.

And I did. Rachel and I had that in common.

Now I know what I know, I don’t want to drag this on a moment longer. It’s like a tumour is lying dormant in me and I just want it out. Toby was not at work the day after the awards or the day after that. Something about ‘a heavy cold’, Shona said. As if. Heavy hangover more like. News travels fast and everyone in the office knows that big Clive, the managing director of SCD, who made a cameo appearance at the awards on Tuesday, was out in Soho with Toby that night on a massive bender involving copious amounts of drugs and a session in a lap-dancing bar. So, whilst his wife was home alone, mourning the loss of his baby, Toby was no doubt snorting coke whilst some pneumatic blonde writhed between his legs.

Not that I know any of this for sure, since my only means of contacting him during the last forty-eight hours has been by text and, learning from past mistakes – the ‘I love you too’ text after Brighton and various others including one where I meant to write
I miss kissing you
but I was so drunk I actually wrote ‘kicking you', which is apt, really in the circumstances – I have restrained myself to one very dignified one, just asking him to meet me here, today, next to the golden Buddha in Battersea Park.

Anyway, I’m sick of texts. I’m sick of not being fully present because I’m too busy listening out for the beep-beep of my phone and a text from him. I’m sick of thinking about him and not being able to live my life because I’m stuck in this go-between of what I wish something was and what it is. I’m sick of the obsessing about Rachel and occasionally hating her when, ordinarily, she would be someone I’d love as a friend.

That’s not me.

It’s August now. The first of the trees are yellowing and the river, which has been motionless for so long, the banks bone-dry, is gliding along with a late summer breeze. I look below me, at the sloping, manicured lawn leading to the promenade where couples take an evening stroll, hand in hand along the Thames, and wonder where I went wrong.

Everything in my life that I’ve worked for, I’ve got. The GCSEs – ten As no less. What a clever girl. The A levels, the first class degree and the top job in a blue chip company. But love? Love is the only real prize, and no amount of tutoring or sticking your head in books makes you good at that. You have to learn on the job, I get that now.

I’ve wasted so much time. I’m thirty-two now, more than a third of the way through my life, and I’ve clung onto the things that are wrong for me, and not grabbed the things that could – if I were brave –
really
make me happy.

I sit down on one of the stone benches at the foot of the statue, tuck my legs beneath me and check my phone to see if Toby’s running late, but nothing. I wonder if he already knows what’s up. I wonder if Rachel told him she told me.

He’s ten minutes late now, but I’m past caring. I love to look at London like this, across the wide, sparkly river, rather than from inside the claustrophobic streets of terraces, from inside my house where I seem to have lived too much of the last decade. I lean back and close my eyes. There’s the end
of summer in the air – the damp, smokiness again and it feels delicious. I’ve always loved autumn, that back-to-school feeling, the promise of a new beginning – and this is mine. This is mine.

I look at my phone, fifteen minutes late now. Maybe he’s not coming, I think. And then:

‘What have you got up your sleeve, Steeley? Bringing me here?’ That familiar lisp. He appears from nowhere, kisses me on the cheek. He’s wearing long shorts and a pale pink, creased shirt. He’s sweating, too. Pure Carlsberg by the smell of him. He sits down beside me, leans back, then takes a Lucky Strike out of his pocket and lights one.

‘So,’ he says patting my thigh. ‘You cool, yeah? You all right? Where’s my picnic, anyway, Steeley? Or are we just going for straight
al fresco?’

He giggles, that public schoolboy giggle that’s beginning to make me want to punch him, until he sees my face and the smile fades.

‘Everything all right?’

‘How’s your heavy cold?’ I say with the emphasis on ‘heavy’.

Toby sniffs, on cue, very un-cold like.

‘Seems to be clearing, actually,’ he says, taking a long, hard drag on his cigarette. ‘This morning was a shocker: bunged-up, sore throat, hacking cough. Tragic.’

I hug my knees, watch a barge as it drags its great weight along the water.

‘Gosh, you two really are in the wars, aren’t you? You with your heavy cold, Rachel with her migraine.’ I’m sniping, I know I am. I don’t want to bring Rachel into this but I can’t help it. I tilt my head to look at him and he stops, cigarette halfway to his mouth.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Oh come on, Toby. We need to talk.’

‘Talk?’ He strokes my cheek but I shrug him off. ‘You’ve got me all the way here, just to talk?’

I look at him now, that inane grin on his face, and I feel like slapping it, I really do.

‘Jesus, Toby. Just stop lying, will you? You’re unbelievable.’

He snorts.

‘Lying? Lying about what?’

‘You weren’t ill today, there’s nothing wrong with you. Except a very shaky morality and no conscience whatsoever.’

‘What’s this about?’ he says, blowing smoke out sideways.

‘You
know
what this is about.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake. So I pulled a fucking sicky. So I lied about a cold. Big fucking deal!’

I glare at him. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’

‘Oh, hang on.’ Toby starts jabbing his finger at me. ‘I get it, I know what this is about. You’ve been talking to Clive, haven’t you?’

Like I said, unbelievable.

‘I don’t give a shit about Clive.’

‘No, but you give a shit about what we got up to, don’t you? You’re totally pissed about that?’ He smokes the last of his fag and stubs it out. ‘So we went to a lap-dancing bar. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a laugh. I didn’t snog anyone, or pay for sex, or put my head in between anyone’s tits.’

My feet slap the hard concrete in frustration.

‘God, you’re a dickhead.’

Toby laughs.

‘It’s a lap-dancing bar, not a brothel, Steeley, and who are you now, anyway? My wife?’

I stop. I try to speak but my mouth just opens wider, nothing comes out.

‘No, I’m not,’ I manage eventually, standing up. ‘Thank God. But I sincerely pity the woman who is.’

The minute I start walking away, I regret it. I haven’t finished the argument, haven’t said even half of what I wanted to say but I am so incensed I couldn’t sit there any longer. Thankfully, Toby comes after me, I can hear his stupid deck shoes slapping the promenade where I’m striding off now, towards Chelsea Bridge.

‘Look, I’m sorry, okay?’ he shouts from behind me. ‘I’m sorry I said that. I’m a twat, you’re right. But Monday night was totally innocent, seriously and I think you’re a beautiful woman, Caroline. And I – I have very strong feelings for you, in fact I love you, I do, it’s just …’

I turn around and wrap my cardigan around me, tightly, in exasperation.

‘It’s nothing to do with the bloody lap-dancing bar! Just stop lying, Toby. Christ. What’s wrong with you? Do you think I was born yesterday?’

He stops, lets his hands, which were placed theatrically on top of his head as he squeezed his eyes shut – a gesture I can’t help thinking he’s seen in films – down by his side.

‘You don’t love me, Toby, you never have,’ I say, half laughing, it’s so obvious to me now. ‘You love your wife, not that you behave like you do most of the time. And don’t say you can love two people at the same time because I’ll hit you.’

‘But I – I do love you,’ he says, walking towards me.

‘Do you? It’s funny how you only ever say that when I’m walking away or not having sex with you, isn’t it? Well, anyway, it’s tough if you do because I don’t love you any more, and maybe I never did, maybe I was just infatuated.’ Then I hit him with it. ‘I know about the miscarriage, Toby.’

His smile slides right off his smug little face.

‘How?’

‘Because Rachel told me.’

‘Rachel?’

‘Yes, Rachel. You know? Your wife? The one who was at
the awards ceremony and won an award that you didn’t even tell me she was up for – not that either of us give a crap about that now. The one you left on Monday night to go on a two-night bender, five days after she lost your baby?’

Toby is speechless, for the first time of knowing him, he doesn’t know what to say.

‘Do you know what?’ I say. It’s like, I’ve started now and I may as well go hell for leather. There’s really nothing left: no pride, no love, not even much hurt any more, so I might as well let it all out. ‘I’d almost convinced myself that what we were doing was okay. That it was okay to sleep with someone’s husband. Rachel was just an annoying woman you talked about, and that didn’t matter because you were going to leave her anyway – ha! How deluded was I? But then I met her, and I saw what a lovely person she is and how ungrateful you are, actually, to take a woman like that for granted. And then I felt extra terrible, and I beat myself up so much. But I was madly in love with you by then, God only knows why! And for some mental reason, I still clung onto the hope that you’d leave her; that somehow, all the things you said about her, all that stuff about her being self-obsessed, work-obsessed, never giving you enough attention, all that bollocks, were true and you’d decide you wanted me. But all the time, all the time we were meeting for the book club, having baths together at the Malmaison, fucking, frolicking about in the sea in Brighton, you were trying to realize your dreams of becoming a family. But do you know what I think?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘But I’m guessing you’re going to tell me anyway.’

‘I don’t think they were
your
dreams, I think they were only Rachel’s. I think you were shit scared. Rachel’s thirty-eight, smart, knows exactly what she wants. She wanted a baby before it was too late but at five years younger, and
about three decades in mental age, you just couldn’t hack the commitment.’

‘I – I don’t know about that, I think that’s a bit unfair!’

‘But listen, Toby, that would have been okay on its own. There’s no shame in being scared of a major thing like having a baby if you’d have gone and talked to your wife about it, but you didn’t. You had an affair.’

Toby jabs a finger at me.

‘Hey now, so did you! It takes two to tango, you know.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ I say. People walking along the promenade are giving us a wide berth, staring at us, but I don’t care. ‘And don’t I fucking well regret it? Don’t I wish more than anything in the world that I hadn’t? I am certainly not blameless, but you? Toby, come
on!
What sort of man has an affair with someone when he’s going for fertility tests with his wife? When his wife is
pregnant
?’

Toby flops his head back, he can’t bear this, I know he can’t. Like a child being told off, he just wants to put his fingers in his ears and get to the next fun part, for it all to go away.

‘Tell me the truth about something, Toby. Just for once in your life, try to tell the truth.’ I say. Rachel’s already confirmed it but I want to hear it from him. ‘That day in Brighton, when we were in the hotel room and Rachel called. She told you she was bleeding, didn’t she?’

‘Um, yes.’

‘And then you wanted sex because you felt guilty and wanted a distraction and then, when I wouldn’t have sex with you, you told me you loved me but you didn’t mean it, did you? That’s why you freaked out and ignored me when I texted that I loved you too. Do you know how used and shit that made me feel?’

‘Oh, Steeley, but I did love you …’ Toby walks closer towards me.

‘And stop calling me Steeley.’

‘Okay, Caroline, then,’ he says, pathetically. ‘Caroline, I do love you, I’m just …’ he screws his eyes up and slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand dramatically – again something that reminds me of a gesture in a film. ‘I’m so confused.’

I shake my head and start walking again. He really was fucking unbelievable.

‘Course you’re confused!’ I shout behind me. ‘You’re confused because you want your cake and to eat it too. But I can’t be shared, Toby. I am good enough to be taken whole, thanks very much.’

We’re climbing up the steps to Chelsea Bridge now, Toby trotting behind me, trying to keep up.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I can see how I might have come over like a prick in all this, and I don’t want you to think I’m a prick because I’m not, really I’m not.’

I stop and turn to him. He’s sweating and out of breath now. He looks a right state, and for a second I have the gratifying feeling of not finding him attractive any more.

‘I’m sure you’re not. Not all of you, anyway. Maybe your little toe has some integrity. But you’ve behaved so much like one in the past couple of months, Toby. I mean, all that stuff you said about Rachel having a migraine, calling her irritating and saying she was “whingeing” when she was in hospital having a
miscarriage?
Having sex with me when your wife was worried she might be losing the baby –
your
baby? How low can you stoop? How can you possibly expect me to have any feelings, any respect left for you at all?’

I start walking up the steps again. When we get to the top, I keep walking but Toby stands on the bridge, shouting over the traffic at me.

‘But I was scared! I didn’t know what to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you.’

I turn around. He looks suddenly small now, dwarfed by the enormous bridge that stretches behind him and the huge, sweeping sky the colour of blood-orange.

‘But you
have
to lose me, don’t you get it? We can’t
do
this any more. I don’t
want
this any more. It’s wrong, Toby.’

‘But, wait, Caroline, just wait. Maybe we can …’ he’s doing the hands on the head thing again.

‘Go back to your wife, Toby. Go home to her because she’s wonderful, and you don’t deserve her. I was never right for you, anyway. Do you know why?’

He shakes his head.

‘Because I need too much. More than you could ever give me. Do you remember when we were in my kitchen and you said all that stuff about how you loved me because I was like a bloke? Able to compartmentalize things? That I didn’t have “constant irrational emotions”, and I agreed? Well, it was all rubbish! All total bollocks! I’ve had nothing but irrational emotions all year and I’m not like a bloke in any way, shape or form. I’m not in control, or aloof, or the woman you thought I was. I was just scared, and a mess, but I’m not scared any more, Toby, and I just want to love and be loved, now. I deserve to be loved, and you can’t give it to me, not just because of the small matter that you’re married, but because you need so much yourself.’