‘Look,’ Min says, ‘I’ll leave you to it. I just wanted to chat with you about something. Can you give me a call when it all settles down?’
‘Sure. Is something wrong?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. It can wait.’
I promise to call her later, then drive back to the ED, and text Bella that I’m outside. A few moments later, my daughter emerges into the hot July sunshine, her head swathed in bandages. Leaving the engine running, I get out and go around to the passenger door to help her into the car.
Caz beats me to it.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the night I drove to London and confronted her about Bagpuss. I dig my fingernails into my palms, fighting the urge to scratch her eyes out. ‘What are you doing here?’
Bella deliberately puts herself between us. ‘She came to see if I was OK. It was really nice of her,’ she adds firmly.
‘I got your text, Louise,’ Caz tells me. ‘I was worried when I didn’t hear back from you. I had to come down and make sure Bella was OK.’
‘How thoughtful of you,’ I say acidly. ‘But there was no need. Everything’s fine.’
‘Obviously I didn’t know that, since you didn’t reply.’
I’m aware of Bella next to me, the tension in her shoulders. She will never know how much it costs me to be civil to this woman. ‘No phones allowed in the hospital, I’m afraid,’ I say, forcing a tight smile. ‘I had to switch it off. Sorry you had a wasted journey.’
‘What about Dad?’ Bella asks her. ‘Is he coming here too?’
Caz hesitates just a fraction too long. ‘He’s at work. It’ll depend on what time he finishes.’
Her tone is light, deceptively casual, but I hear it: that giveaway note in her voice, the combination of doubt and fear and denial. It’s subtle: only a woman who has wondered where her husband is, and with whom, would notice it. ‘He’s not working,’ I contradict swiftly. ‘I called INN this morning. They said he’d taken the day off today.’
‘He’s out in the field.’
‘Not according to his secretary. Jessica always knows where he is. And she said specifically he’d cancelled a shoot they’d set up for this afternoon so he could take a personal day. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘I don’t keep tabs on him,’ Caz says tightly.
I smile. ‘Perhaps you should.’
She smiles back, her eyes cold. ‘I’ve never needed to.’
Bella abruptly gets into the car. ‘You shouldn’t leave the engine running, Mum,’ she says, buckling her seatbelt. ‘It’s really bad for the environment.’
On the way home from the hospital, I stop briefly at my mother’s to pick up Tolly, but I don’t stay and chat as I usually would. Apart from my anxiety to get Bella home, I’m still too angry with Mum after our fight yesterday. No doubt I’ll get over it, but invoking Roger’s name was a low blow. The episode with Jennifer Lewison wasn’t my finest hour, certainly, but it all happened a long time ago now. The situation with Caz is wholly different. I’m not fabricating what she’s doing to my family. Why won’t anyone believe me?
Bella eats a large bowl of tomato soup without complaint for dinner, so my worry about her eases a little. I send her up to her bedroom to rest, and bathe Tolly and put him to bed, then pour myself a large glass of cheap Tesco plonk, and go outside. The late evening sunshine casts long shadows as I curl up in the wicker basket chair at the bottom of the garden, cradling my wineglass. I love this house; it’s my home, the only one the children have ever known. But I’m honestly not sure how much longer we can afford to live here. Our finances were pretty ropey even with the job at Whitefish; without it, we’re in serious trouble. I don’t want to acknowledge it, but a large part of this ridiculous vendetta with Caz is my fault. I shouldn’t have retaliated the way I did. But I still don’t understand what set it all off. For four years, we’ve muddled along in a wary Cold War without either of us reaching for the nuclear button. What’s brought us to crisis point now?
I dig a bare foot into the dry grass, and rock the chair back and forth as the roseate sky deepens to indigo. I can’t help a tiny spark of sympathy for Caz. Andrew only ended up in her arms because I drove him away. If I hadn’t screwed up, he’d never have left me. Maybe the seeds for what’s happening now were sown then, when she realised she would never know the security of being his first choice.
My wine is a little warm, but I drink it anyway. What I did to Andrew was no worse than what he’d done to me. The difference was, he couldn’t forgive me for it.
I found out about his affair in the most banal of ways. He’d left a phone, a second phone, in his jacket pocket when he went out jogging one Sunday morning, and I’d found it when it rang. I wasn’t stupid; I’d known immediately what it was, and what it meant. Andrew always had to have the latest, all-singing, all-dancing technology; this phone, his second, secret phone, was a cheap pay-as-you-go with just one number in the call log. If that hadn’t given the game away, the photos in the camera roll would have done.
Much as I’d wanted to confront him the second he got back from his run, to scream and cry and change the locks, a deep, atavistic instinct had told me to play the long game. This Caz, whoever she was, this pretty blonde snuggling against him in her pink Puffa jacket and tight jeans in the selfies on his phone, wasn’t his wife. I’d had the advantage of Bella, of more than a decade of marriage and entwined lives and friends and family. I was still the one he loved, I’d been certain of that.
Somehow, I held it together and said nothing. Looking back now, I don’t know how I managed it; I think it drove me a little mad. For months, I waited and prayed the affair would burn itself out, and in the meantime, I endured. If Andrew slipped away to make a ‘work call’, I’d pretend I had no idea he was calling his mistress. I allowed him to think he’d got away with it when he disappeared for six days on assignment to ‘Glasgow’ and came back with a tan. I let him make love to me every week, as he’d always done, and tried not to ask myself if he did it like this, with her.
He didn’t leave me. But he didn’t give her up, either. And the months of waiting almost killed me. I couldn’t sleep; I could hardly eat. I felt as if I was being eaten away by acid from the inside out. I was vulnerable, distraught; hardly in my right mind. And I made a mistake.
I startle now as I hear the sound of a car on gravel. Spinning the basket chair around so I can see the driveway, I spot Andrew climbing out of a taxi, almost as if my memories have summoned him. He knows Nicky’s history; he’ll have been almost as worried about Bella as me. He must have come straight here from the station.
He reaches back into the cab for a battered holdall I recognise from every foreign assignment he ever went on. Slipping my bare feet back into my sandals, I leave the chair swinging and hasten around the side of the house.
The red tail-lights of the taxi illuminate Andrew’s face as he stands in the middle of the drive, his expression weary and defeated. As soon as I reach him, he drops the bag at our feet and clings to me like a drowning man.
I pull back anxiously and search his face. ‘What is it, Andrew? Has something happened?’