A Place in the Country (4 page)

Because he'd given up. He never came after her. Never came to get her. Never reclaimed her. Even in the courtroom, he hadn't shown up. “The mother can have custody,” he'd said in a message via his lawyers. “It's the correct thing to do. Children should always be with their mothers.”

Bloody hell, what was he thinking? Issy had cried herself to sleep for over a year now. Well,
months,
anyway. Until she'd told herself to fuckin' stop it. Aw, bloody hell,
there.
She'd used that word again and she'd sworn she would not.

She thought of all the hours she'd spent in front of the bathroom mirror, checking out her image, trying to figure out what was wrong that her own father no longer wanted her. Left profile, right profile, three-quarters; allowing that her nose was too big, or was it too wide? That her mouth was big too but looked nothing like that famous movie star's; that her forehead had a definite bump, her hairline was lopsided, and her eyes a boring brown. How could a girl with brown eyes and brown hair have pale lashes? Ask her? She did.

Her father never called her on the phone now; just the occasional text message saying, like, hope your grades are good, I'm sending you a cashmere sweater; e-mail me a recent photo so I don't forget you. But he did forget her.

Still, the sweater was nice. She'd never worn it; it was preserved in tissue paper in the old Hello Kitty bag her father brought her from Japan years ago. That, and a photo of the two of them (without her mom—Caroline must have taken the picture) holding hands, walking down a country lane. She couldn't remember where that country lane was but she did remember the feel of her dad's strong hand clasping hers, and how carelessly happy she had been. She had thought he would never let go.

Oh, but she'd loved him so. Still did.

Actually, her father's and mother's stories of how they had met were completely different.

James told Issy he'd walked into the bar at Singapore's Raffles Hotel and immediately noticed the tall, dark-haired, long-legged woman perched on a stool, sipping a mojito through a pink straw that exactly matched her pink lipstick. Very pretty, he'd thought, catching her eye. As well as he could, since she was wearing glasses.

She was also wearing a very short skirt and showing a lot of thigh. “I wanted to kiss her knees they were so pretty,” he told Issy. (Kiss her
knees
? Ugh! Issy remembered thinking.) “Instead, I said hello, asked where she was from, and her name.

“She said she was from London,” and her name was Caroline Muggins, or Huggins or something odd like that. He told Issy he'd thought, huh she's had one too many mojitos, this girl, but then she smiled at him and said I'm going to marry you. He'd asked her why? Was it because she'd promised herself to marry the third man to walk into the bar that night? Or was she afraid of being left on the shelf? Or did she really fancy him?

Anyhow, he'd already been married. “Twice,” he'd told her.

“Hmm.” She'd sucked thoughtfully on that pink mojito straw. “A serial husband. But when you marry me I will be the
last
wife.”

“You'll notice,” James had reminded his daughter, who was curled up in bed, big eyes fastened on him as he told her the story one more time, “that your mother asked
me
to marry
her
. Not the other way around.”

She asked if that really mattered and he'd said not then, but her mom hadn't liked signing the prenup.

Now, of course, Issy knew what a prenup was and it meant her mom didn't have much money.

Anyway, her mother's different story was that she had been alone in the bar at the Raffles Hotel. “Sipping that mojito,” she said. “It was the first I'd ever tasted. We were more into gin and tonic when I was eighteen.”

“But you didn't drink when you were
eighteen
!” Issy had interrupted. “You had to be twenty-one.”

“Right,” her mother had said, taking a deep breath. “Well, of course, I meant
after
I was twenty-one. So, anyway, I was sipping that bloody mojito—ooops, sorry, shouldn't have said that, it's just that I'll never drink a mojito again.”

Issy had thought it must be because it didn't taste very good.

Her mother went on, “I was wearing a black pencil skirt, pulled demurely down…”

“Daddy said you were showing your thighs.”

Caroline closed her eyes as though trying to remember. She smiled, just a faint upward twitch of the lips. “So maybe I was,” she admitted. “And I had on this top from Zara, black silk jersey, and it kept slipping off one shoulder and showing my pink bra strap. Now, what kind of sophisticated young woman would wear a pink bra under her sexy black top?”

Issy didn't know, but still she was fascinated. Her mother was so pretty she could have worn her dressing gown and it would have looked all right; her tall, slender, bosomy mom, with her long, black hair cut in bangs that swept over her shortsighted greenish eyes and got tangled in her red cat's-eye glasses; with her slopey cheeks and lovely wide pink mouth that was great at giving kisses. And she had pretty hands that always held her tightly when she told this story.
“Clinging on for dear life,”
her mom used to say.

Anyway, her mom had gone on with her version of the story. “I was just sitting there, perched on a tall barstool. Showing too much thigh, when this guy came in. He stood a couple of seats away from me and ordered a mojito, exactly like mine.

“He gave me a look,” Caroline remembered with a smile. “Our eyes met and linked and I thought oh my God he is so handsome, so … Anyway,” she'd gone on briskly. “He asked if I minded him joining me. That is, if you are alone, he said. And oh, Issy I was so alone, all by myself in Singapore. I'd just finished two years of culinary school and was running away from a boy I thought not man-of-the-world enough for me. I was on my way to Hong Kong to do some boring cooking job, but you see, I didn't even get as far as Hong Kong because your father said—there and then—he said,
I am going to marry you. And I don't even know your name.

“So I told him my name and he told me his, and instead of being Caroline Meriton, I became all at once, Caroline Evans.”

“And was it lovely?” Issy always asked the same question, sucking on her thumb, already half asleep, knowing her mom would tuck the sheet up over her chest, turn down the lamp, kiss her, and always say, “It was so lovely, sweetheart. I will never forget it.”

Of course now she knew her mother had meant her dad was sexy. Then, she had been too young to know about sexual attraction. She wasn't even sure now what it was, except that the word “fuck” had something to do with it.

She'd guessed she must be a late bloomer or something, but she just didn't want to know. She wanted men to be sweet and nice and to wear beautiful suits and ties, and loafers with tassels and smell of Vetiver cologne, like her dad. In fact she was horrified by the whole idea of men taking off their clothes and showing their dangly bits. Who on earth ever wanted to see that?

They'd given a talk in class, demonstrating with cucumbers and condoms, about how it was done and how not to get pregnant, while the girls
giggled
and said no way, and some sniggered and said, “
yeah right…”

And then came the upheaval, her mom's unhappiness, her dad suddenly remote, hardly ever home; the fights, and then leaving, just like that, with never a thought of how it might affect
her.
She had not even had time to say goodbye to her friends, her school, her swim club, her Saturday sleepovers. It was all gone. Just like that. And she didn't know what to do. And worse, nor did her mother.

Now, here they were, in rented rooms over a pub in the Cotswolds. The rain was still pelting against the window and the kitten moved restlessly in its basket.

She reached out, touched the pathetic little heap of cheap-looking gray fur. The milk was still warm and she inserted the dropper into its slack mouth and squeezed. It began to suck. It wanted to live after all.

Issy almost never did, she had trained herself not to, but now, quite suddenly, she began to cry.

 

chapter 7

In the room
down the hall from her daughter, Caroline was not sleeping either. Her thoughts, as they always did, had returned to James, and what had happened. She remembered it all so clearly.

The day they left they'd flown to Hong Kong and checked in to the Peninsula Hotel. That was where James always stayed—nothing but the best for him, so Caroline determined it would be “nothing but the best” for his wife and daughter.

She'd taken a small suite and charged it to James's platinum card. She ordered room service, just the way James did, and overtipped the waiter, the way he always did. She drank a martini—telling herself she would only have one because she was in charge of a child. Well, a fourteen-year-old anyway, but when Issy had finally cried herself to sleep, she sent down for another, before she also cried herself to sleep on the sofa, only to be roused by the phone ringing.

It's him,
she'd thought, waking up, startled and still in her crumpled white skirt and the yellow sweater that was years old and matted from too many washings but happened to be the first thing she'd grabbed when she was so mad she couldn't even see straight. Her hand reached for the phone and then stopped. Why wasn't James calling on her cell?

But the phone kept on, so she answered.

“My name is Gayle Lee,” a woman's voice said. “I need to see you.”

“Do I know you?” Caroline pushed back her tangled hair and stuck her glasses on her nose as if they would make her see the woman more clearly, or at least remember who she was. Could she be an emissary from James? A lawyer, asking them to return at once, all was forgiven? Everything back to normal?

“I am on my way up to your suite,” the woman said, in such a crisp firm tone Caroline had no choice but to agree.

When she opened the door a couple of minutes later the woman walked right past her without so much as a glance or a hello, or a hand held out in greeting. Caroline watched astonished, as she stood, taking in the small and by now rather untidy suite. Issy had left her clothes exactly where she had stepped out of them, in the middle of the living room floor, and for once Caroline had not picked up after her. She supposed it was because it reminded her of James, who she was always picking up after. Her husband always left his stuff on the floor for someone else to take care of.

“How do you do,” she said pointedly, in her best and most English disapproving voice, and when the English did “disapproval,” people usually got the point immediately.

Not this woman, though. She walked silently to the window, then turned and looked at Caroline. They took each other in.

She was Asian, older, yet somehow ageless, with amazing platinum white hair, a clear tan skin and, Caroline was soon to discover, a brain like a machete, ready to strike. She was strikingly attractive, slender and straight and taut as an armed crossbow. She wore traditional Chinese dress, green brocade, buttoned at the neck, slit to the thigh.

The sudden sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told Caroline she had finally met James's mistress.
This
was the woman he'd betrayed her for.

“I am your husband's business partner,” Gayle Lee said.

Caroline sank into the cushioned sofa.
So that's what it was called these days.
She shook back her uncombed hair and straightened her glasses. In the middle of a crisis she was wishing she had at least put on lipstick before being taken by surprise.

“I have been James's partner for twenty years,” Gayle Lee said.

But she and James had only been together for sixteen! This must have been going on since before they were married.

Gayle Lee was still standing by the window and Caroline noticed she was clever enough to keep her back to the light so Caroline couldn't see how old she really was. Older than her, that was for sure, but so perfect it didn't matter. Her unusual platinum hair was cut in the traditional Chinese bob with deep bangs. She had narrow dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a small mouth colored the reddest Caroline had ever seen. Her heart sank. Gayle Lee looked great. And she meant
great.

“I didn't know James had a business partner,” she said, still hoping she meant strictly “business.” “Other than Mark Santos.”

“Santos was not involved. We had a private ‘arrangement,' James and I.”

“
Arrangement
?” It was a dumb repeat of her word, but she couldn't think. How could she? She was being presented with a fait accompli she'd known nothing about, and she had been married to James for
sixteen years.

Gayle Lee gave her a hard-eyed look and said, “I heard you had left James.”

Caroline knew the only person she could have heard it from was her husband.

“I'm here to warn you,” Gayle Lee said clearly and coldly.

Suddenly angry, Caroline sat up straighter. Who the hell did this Gayle Lee think she was anyway?

“You will not get a penny from James's and my business,” Gayle Lee was saying. She walked closer and stood over her. “And I'm warning you, it will not be in your best interests to try.”

“
Mommy
?”

Issy was standing in the doorway in her T-shirt and underpants because that's the way she had climbed, still crying, into bed, without so much as a shower or pajamas. She was staring, amazed, at the green brocade, platinum vision hovering menacingly over her mother.

“She looks like James,” Gayle Lee said. Then she walked away.

Her hand on the doorknob, she turned. “I advise you to remember what I said. There are changes coming and they will not be to your advantage. I wish you goodnight.”