Got You Back (30 page)

‘Oh, shit, Owen. I'm really sorry. I just assumed…’ She tailed off, not knowing quite what to say.

‘What? You just assumed I must be so desperate that I'd have sex with you when you were practically comatose. Thanks a lot.’

‘I just couldn't remember, that's all. When I woke up and you were there, well…’

‘Forget it,’ he said, starting to walk away. ‘Of course I must have taken advantage of you because I'm such a loser.’

‘God, I really am sorry,’ she called after him, and then she noticed Sam McNeil standing in the doorway of the shop, watching the whole drama unfold.

‘Can I help you?’ Katie said aggressively, and Sam tried to pretend she had been examining the baby plum tomatoes all along.

Katie turned on her heel and walked off, blushing furiously. How was she supposed to have known that Owen was the one man in a million that would have behaved impeccably?

41

James had given up looking for a flat. Everything was too expensive, too far away or just too depressing. Besides, the Travel Motel was happy to continue accepting payment by credit card, which meant he could keep his head well buried in the sand as far as his financial situation was concerned. Harry had agreed that he could do one extra day a week in the surgery and he still had some savings, which would hopefully help to keep him afloat for a while. He didn't like to think for how long. He had sold his car for a ridiculously low price, because it had already been broken into twice, sitting in the street outside his and Stephanie's house, and now he was on the phone, trying to explain to an estate agent in Lincoln exactly why it was a good idea to sell a building with a large extension attached that needed to be pulled down.

‘It's hardly worth my while,’ the man was saying. ‘I mean, I suppose I could market it as a renovation project but then you're looking at, what?, asking about fifty per cent of its true value.’

James thought about his beautifully appointed surgery, which had only been redecorated four months ago and wanted to weep. ‘And what's the alternative?’ he asked, feeling angry with the estate agent for, he didn't know quite what. It wasn't his fault, after all.

‘Well, you pull the extension down, make good and
then we put it on the market. It'll fetch a much better price.’

‘Fine,’ James said, not feeling fine at all. ‘I'll get back to you.’

The one thing he knew was that he couldn't go up to Lower Shippingham himself to sort this mess out. He had no doubt he was a pariah in the village by now and he was far too much of a coward to ever want to risk bumping into Katie. Or Sally or Simone or pretty much anyone, really. He tried to think if there was anyone up there he trusted to do the work without supervision, but the only builder he had any kind of relationship with — the one who had built the extension in the first place — was Sally O'Connell's boyfriend Johnny, and he somehow didn't feel like calling him would be the best idea he'd ever had. He would have to take a chance and call one of the big firms in Lincoln and get them to do it, although God knows how much that was going to cost him.

He knew that the time had come for him to sit down and have a proper adult conversation with Stephanie about what should happen next, but he was too afraid that she was going to start talking about divorce to initiate the conversation and, besides, she seemed to be avoiding being left alone with him. Whenever he went to pick up Finn or to spend the evening with him at the house, Cassie always seemed to be there too, right up until the moment Stephanie left. And then, when Stephanie came home, she still always kept the taxi outside, engine running, to take him back to the Travel Motel. He knew she was seeing somebody. It was obvious. And he suspected that there were other nights, when either Natasha or
Cassie babysat, when she didn't come home at all. After her comment that first evening he had made a real effort to smarten himself up but he wasn't sure she'd even noticed.

He wanted to do the right thing by her. Of course he wasn't planning to try to persuade her that they should sell the family home so they could both buy somewhere smaller. He was the guilty party so he was the one who should have to make sacrifices and, besides, he wanted Finn to be able to be as settled as possible. But he was terrified that he was going to be left with nothing. That by the time he had sold the surgery for whatever fraction of its worth, he would have credit-card bills so huge that the money would simply be swallowed up and he would be left with nowhere to live and no savings left to bail himself out.

He was a vet, for God's sake, and he had trained for years so that not only could he spend his days doing something he loved but he could also earn big money. Long term, he thought, he could set up on his own down here, although for that he would need capital to fund the start-up costs. He had made half-hearted enquiries at several other practices to see if he could pick up the odd day here and there, but no one seemed interested.

He could get work a couple of days a week doing something else entirely, but what? He had no other skills. And, besides, he needed his days off so that he could keep tabs on Steph. He had taken to hanging around furtively outside the house sometimes — luckily, this being London, his old neighbours didn't bat an eyelid — and had watched her coming and going, trying to work out
who it was that she was seeing, if indeed there was anyone. In the past three weeks — apart from the four evenings he had looked after Finn — she had been out at least another three times. Luckily there was a small green space almost opposite the house where he could sit with his sandwiches and his bottle of water and wait for her to return. He hadn't seen any sign of a man with her, which gave him hope. Realistically he knew there was someone, but until he saw the evidence he could convince himself that she was just out having a few drinks with the girls. He had thought about following her on her nights out — hailing a taxi and offering up the classic follow-that-cab line from the movies — but he knew that, sad as he had become, even he wasn't
that
sad. If she had met someone she liked, she would bring him home eventually. Meanwhile he needed to try and get her to see what she was losing. (And what was that? he thought. A sad unshaven man who lived in a Travel Motel and ate baked beans out of the tin in the evenings because he had nowhere to cook and no money to buy a takeaway. Worse, a man who had proved himself to be untrustworthy and not worth investing in emotionally.)

He decided to go for a walk. The four walls of his room at the Travel Motel were suffocating him and there was only so much daytime TV he could watch. He called Stephanie and left a message that he was going to pick Finn up from school. He had no idea whether or not she was working at the moment, although she always seemed to be busy when he spoke to her but, of course, that might just be an excuse to get off the phone. Then he rang Cassie, who answered, and he told her the same. She
sounded delighted to have the afternoon off, as he had known she would be.

He slogged up Chalk Farm Road towards Belsize Park, puffing a bit from the effort of walking uphill. He felt at home once he got up here where the streets were greener and getting mugged was an altogether more remote prospect. These days, he was finding it hard to remember why he had always hated it so much. It seemed positively like an oasis of calm compared to the Travel Motel's surroundings. He arrived outside the gates of the little school with five minutes to spare and stood there, feeling self-conscious in among the young mums and even younger au pairs. Just a few weeks ago he would have seen this as a great opportunity, a hunting ground where he would have used the fact that he cared enough for his son to come and pick him up from school as a flirting tool. Now he couldn't have been less interested. There was only one woman he wanted to impress.

Finn's face lit up when he saw James waiting for him, and then he must have remembered that his friends were around because he rearranged his expression into something he thought was more moody, and therefore more grown-up, and said, ‘What are
you
doing here?’

James laughed and, resisting ruffling his son's hair, patted him on the back instead. ‘I gave Cassie the afternoon off,’ he said. ‘I thought we could give David's cage a good clean-out.’

And then Finn said something that made James's heart stop: ‘Does Mum want you to meet Michael too?’

Michael. So that was his name. James thought for a
moment that he was going to throw up the instant noodles he had eaten for lunch into the hedge. He mentally flicked through everyone he knew, friends, fathers of Finn's classmates, people Stephanie had ever mentioned working with. He couldn't come up with a Michael. He breathed deeply. ‘Who's Michael?’

Finn, oblivious to the reaction he had invoked in his father, said blithely, ‘He's Mum's new boyfriend. He's coming round this evening so I can meet him.’

‘Right. What time?’ James was trying, and failing, to sound casual.

‘Don't know,’ Finn said, bored of this topic now. ‘When Mum gets home probably.’

Oh, God. Having given Cassie the day off, James knew that he would have to stay with Finn until Stephanie got home. On the other hand this was just what he had been wanting — to know who Stephanie was seeing, to work out who the competition was. ‘How soon after Mum gets home, do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will he travel home with her? Do they work near each other? What does he do?’

‘Why are you asking so many questions?’ Finn said grumpily. ‘Don't you like Mum having a boyfriend?’

‘Not much, no,’ James said miserably, and then wished he hadn't.

‘Mum said you've got a girlfriend.’

‘I haven't. I did have but I definitely haven't any more. It was a very bad thing to do.’

‘Having a girlfriend is a bad thing to do?’ Finn asked, and James couldn't tell whether he was being serious or not.

‘When you already have a wife it is.’ ‘Well, obviously,’ Finn said, rolling his eyes. ‘Everyone knows that.’

42

Since she had picked up James's message telling her that he was on his way to collect Finn from school, Stephanie had frantically been trying to call him back. Not today. She was always happy for Finn to see his father, just not this afternoon. It had taken her a few sleepless nights to decide that Michael was worthy of an introduction to her son. And then a few more anxious days before she could bring herself to suggest it to both Michael and Finn. A couple of weeks into her new relationship, she had started to mention Michael's name casually around the house. She had had no idea whether this was the right way to let your child know you had a new partner without traumatizing them for ever, but she didn't really know how else to do it, and to have sat Finn down and made a big announcement would have made way too big a deal out of something that was still a casual affair.

Finn had been remarkably laid-back about the whole thing which made her worry that he hadn't quite understood what her relationship with Michael was, so one day, when she was cooking him his favourite fish fingers and beans, she had said, in as
blasé
a way as she could manage, ‘You know Michael is sort of like my boyfriend?’

Finn had merely rolled his eyes and had said, ‘You're too old to have a boyfriend,’ which hadn't made her feel any better.

Then, two days later, he had said to her out of nowhere, ‘Arun's mum's got a boyfriend.’

She'd waited to see if he added anything else and, when he didn't, the only thing she could come up with was, ‘Oh? Has she?’

‘Like you,’ he'd said, and then he'd gone off to play with Sebastian and that had been that.

Michael had been a slightly harder prospect. Not because she thought he wouldn't be interested in Finn — he always asked about him and he hadn't yet yawned when she was in the middle of a story about some cute thing or other that Finn had done and which she knew, deep down, could only be fascinating to a parent — but because asking him if he wanted to meet her son was like asking him if his intentions were serious. It felt only one step away from asking him if he wanted to settle down.

In the end, though, it had been him who had suggested it. They were at the opening of a gallery in Shoreditch, once again surrounded by the self-appointed beautiful people who lived in the surrounding area. In truth, Stephanie was getting quite worn out with the amount of culture she had been asked to ingest lately. They had been to exhibitions and concerts and installations, all of which seemed to happen within a half-mile radius of Hoxton Square and all of which seemed to attract the same thirty-five people.

Stephanie had never been comfortable with the whole Hoxton thing. It all felt a bit late-1990s and a little too self-consciously cool. Michael's friends were mostly artists or musicians, although she suspected that half of them actually had day jobs in accounts departments and the
other half were squandering their wealthy families’ money. They had a way of making her feel inadequate without, she was sure, meaning to, with their obscure references and their shabby couldn't-care-less chic, which, she knew, took them hours to perfect. She always felt overdressed, and overstyled and altogether too… conventional. Without fail, they were nice to her and made an effort to include her, but sometimes she yearned to have a conversation about something down-to-earth, like what was on the TV or a film she'd seen that didn't have subtitles.

Anyway, two of those friends had brought their children to the exhibition, a boy of six and a girl of eight. Both were precocious in the extreme and were pontificating with their parents about the meaning behind the paintings in a way that made Stephanie want to slap them. Or maybe it was the parents she had wanted to slap, she couldn't be sure. Michael had mentioned that Stephanie had a son and, somewhere in the ensuing conversation, had said he was looking forward to meeting Finn and, what was more, that it was one of his greatest regrets that he had never had children of his own. Pia, his wife, had, of course, never wanted them. Of course, the friends had said knowingly, leaving Stephanie none the wiser.