The Other Hand (22 page)

Harder to disguise was the incontrovertible change in me. I felt
wonderful
. I had never felt less sensible, less serious, less Surrey. My skin started to glow. It was so blatant that I tried to conceal it with foundation, but it was no use: I simply radiated
joie de vivre
. I started partying again, as I hadn’t since my early twenties. Lawrence got me in to all the Home Office events. The new Home Secretary loved to meet the media, to tell them over canapes how tough he was going to be. There were endless soirees, and always an after-party. I met a new crowd. Actors, painters, business people. I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt since before I met Andrew—the thrill of realising I was attractive, of knowing myself irresistible, of being half drunk on champagne and looking around at the bright, smiling faces and giggling when I realised that suddenly anything could happen.

So I should hardly have been surprised when it did. Inevitably, at one of those parties, I finally bumped into my husband, crumpled and red eyed from the office. Andrew hated parties—I suppose he was only there on some fact-finding mission. Lawrence even introduced us. A packed room. Music—flagship British music—some band that had made it big on the internet. Lawrence, beaming, flushed with champagne, his hand resting riskily on the small of my back.

“Oh, hi! Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah is the editor of
Nixie
. Andrew’s a columnist for
The Times
, terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you two are going to get on.”

“So was the priest,” said Andrew.

“I’m sorry?”

“He was sure we were going to get on. When he married us.”

Andrew, light hearted, almost smiling. Lawrence—poor Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back. Andrew, noticing. Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.

“I didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”

“Yes. Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine…you know.”

My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles to the crown of my head. My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful, redrawing its county boundaries to annex my new life. I looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew was still there, standing very still, very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.

That night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about
saving our marriage
. Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said sounded like his
Times
column, and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my magazine.

“At what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”

“I just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”

“Happiness isn’t something one can pick up off the shelf, it’s something one has to work at.”

“You bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”

“Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”

It was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.

Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t Used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant baseline of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realise it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.

I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to
Book of the Week
on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.

I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”

“What, now? To my
house?
”

“You said Andrew was away.”

I shivered. “Oh goodness. I mean…you don’t even know where I live.”

“Well, where do you live?”

“I’m in Kingston.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

“No, Lawrence…no.”

“But why? No one will know, Sarah.”

“I know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”

He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next programme. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their programme was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fume might be more exciting than Radio 4.

“No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

“But why not?”

“Because my house is
me
, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

The next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was cancelled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

“Make a wish!” I said.

Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

“Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgement. A sort of life on short legs.

Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

Silence.

“Andrew?”

“Charlie does, does he?”

“Yes.”

“And what about you? Do you want me back?”

“I want what Charlie wants.”

Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory. “You really know how to make a man feel special.”

“Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

“You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

“I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

“Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice.
A slut for his mother
. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up
adulteress, cuckolder
and
narcissist
before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

“Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence,…I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realised why it was so popular.

“
Just
sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put
just
in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimise at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”

“Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realisation hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.

“Please, Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery. A fresh start.”

A pause. He cleared his throat. “Yes. All right.”

“We need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and even Charlie—we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a holiday.”

Andrew groaned. “Oh, Jesus. A holiday?”

“Yes. Andrew. Please.”

“Jesus. All right. Where?”

The next day, I called him back.

“I’ve got a freebie, Andrew—Ibeno Beach in Nigeria, open-ended tickets. We can leave on Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“You can file your column before we leave, and you’ll be back in time for the next one.”

“But
Africa?
”

“There’s a beach, Andrew. It’s raining here and it’s dry season there. Come on, let’s get some sun.”

“Nigeria, though? Why not Ibiza, or the Canaries?”

“Don’t be boring, Andrew. Anyway it’s just a beach holiday. Come on, how bad can it be?”

Serious times. Once they have rolled in, they hang over you like low cumulus. That’s how it was with me and Andrew, after we came back from Africa. Shock, then recrimination, then the two awful years of Andrew’s deepening depression, and the continuing affair with Lawrence that I never could quite seem to stop.

I think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realise you’ve been carrying the weather around with you. That’s what I was explaining to Little Bee on the afternoon she came with me to pick up Batman from nursery. I sat with her, drinking tea at the kitchen table.

“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. I think we both need to move on.”

Little Bee nodded. Under the table, Batman was playing with a Batman action figure. It seemed the smaller Batman was engaged in a desperate battle with an unfinished bowl of cornflakes. I started explaining to Little Bee how I was going to help her.

“What I’m going to do first is track down your caseworker—
oh, Charlie, food is not a toy&mdash
;track down your caseworker and find out where your documents are held. Then we can—
please, Charlie, don’t get those flakes everywhere, don’t make me tell you again&mdash
;then we can challenge your legal status, find out whether we can make an appeal, and so on. I looked this up on the web and apparently—
Charlie! Please! If I have to pick up that spoon one more time I will take away your Batman figure&mdash
;apparently if we can get you temporary resident status, I can arrange for you to take a British Citizenship Exam, which is just simple stuff, really—
Charlie! For God’s sake! Right, that’s it. Get out. Now! Out of the kitchen and come back when you’ve decided to be good&mdash
;just simple stuff about the kings and queens and the English civil war and so on, and I’ll help you with the revision, and then—
oh, Charlie, oh, goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry, Batman. I’m so sorry. Come here
.”

Batman flinched away from my arms. His lip wobbled and his face went red and he howled, abandoning himself utterly to grief in that way only infants and superheroes have—that way that knows misery is bottomless and insatiable—that honest way. Little Bee rubbed Batman’s head, and he buried his masked face in her leg. I watched his little bat cape shaking as he sobbed.

“Oh, God, Bee,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a mess at the moment.”

Little Bee smiled. “It’s okay, Sarah, it’s okay.”

The kitchen tap dripped. For something to do I got up and tightened it, but the drips kept coming. I couldn’t understand why that upset me so much.

“Oh, Bee,” I said. “We’ve got to get a grip, both of us. We dan’t let ourselves be the people things happen to.”

Later, there was a knock at the front door. I pulled myself together and went in through the house. I opened the door to Lawrence, suited, travel bag slung over his shoulder. I saw his relief, his involuntary smile when he saw me.

“I didn’t know if I’d got the right address,” he said.

“I’m not sure you have.”

His smile disappeared. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I’ve only just put my husband in the ground. We can’t do this. What about your wife?”

Lawrence shrugged. “I told Linda I was going on a management course,” he said. “Birmingham. Three days. Leadership.”

“You think she believed you?”

“I just thought you might need some support.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some.”

He looked over my shoulder at Little Bee, standing in the hallway. “That’s her, is it?”

“She’s staying for as long as she wants.”

Lawrence lowered his voice. “Is she legal?”