Page 4 of The Girlfriend

L AURA SAT IN HER USUAL SEAT, AT A RIGHT ANGLE TO HER HUSBAND , and picked at her grilled-chicken salad.

All the windows in their large, airy dining room were open, but it still felt oppressive.

She’d spent a languorous afternoon in the garden.

Daniel had been sprawled out on a lounger, she under the giant umbrella.

He would answer her questions, with eyes closed against the sun, laughing at her enthusiasm to know everything about Cherry; she was taking full advantage of the fact he couldn’t see her drink him in.

Then, just when she’d stood to go and start cooking, he’d opened his eyes and sat up, with an awkward look on his face.

“I meant to say . . .”

She turned back, a smile on her face.

“I sort of promised Cherry . . . It’s a concert. In the park . . . I’m sorry, I know I said I’d stay home with you and Dad. . . .”

She quickly swallowed her disappointment and brushed off his apologies, telling him to go and enjoy himself.

Laura looked down the length of the empty gleaming formal table that seated ten, with just her and Howard clutching the end as if they were on a sinking ship, and suddenly felt an overwhelming irritation with it and the bizarre way in which they sat, following some dead ritual for so long neither of them questioned it.

She turned her gaze to him. He didn’t seem bothered by the table, the heat, the fact they’d stopped talking to each other.

He was reading the day’s Telegraph, with his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, while filling his mouth with salad and new potatoes.

He’d been out all afternoon—she was used to that—but now he was back and she wanted to talk.

She heard the chink of his knife on the china plate, the Mozart playing in the background, and her voice intruding sounded alien.

“Anything interesting?”

He didn’t look up. “Just the golf.”

The golf. She felt a twitch of hurt. That was one of the few things he still got excited about.

That, and Marianne, of course. She never knew which he was really doing.

He’d always tell her it was the golf, every Saturday, Sunday, and some weekday afternoons too, when he could get out of the office.

However, she knew—knew by the way he came back a little happier, a private happiness he kept within himself—which days he’d seen her.

It wasn’t that it was a surprise; that had come twenty years ago when she’d first discovered the affair.

Mrs. Moore had gone through his pockets before taking the suits to the dry cleaners and left the receipts on the kitchen worktop.

She’d seen them at breakfast, after Howard had already left for work, and Laura knew in absolute certainty she’d not received those flowers, nor had she been taken to lunch the previous Saturday.

He denied it at first, of course, but she knew, and eventually he angrily admitted it—as if it was her fault.

“All right, it’s true. Are you happy now?”

It was the wrong choice of words. Of course, she wasn’t happy, her world had just imploded, and then she discovered it had been going on for two years and he was in love with Marianne.

She was married, too, though, had young children, and wasn’t prepared to split up the family.

Laura considered leaving him—she had some money, so she would’ve been all right—but there was Daniel to think about.

And Howard, in an emotional outburst, said he didn’t want to leave his son, who was barely out of toddlerhood, so he promised to finish it and she took him back.

But things changed. Howard was miserable for weeks, working late and hardly saying a word, and the irony was that he never saw Daniel anyway.

They fell into a pattern. He went to work and she brought up their son.

Laura was used to loneliness. Her childhood had been an endless string of nannies as her mother went to parties and her father was at work.

She was an only child—it had been too inconvenient for her parents to have any more.

Laura had longed for a relationship with her mother, but it never came, and both her parents were now long dead.

Determined that Daniel wouldn’t feel as abandoned as she had, she buried the hurt over Howard’s affair into positive things for her son: clubs, holidays, friends.

Their relationship grew strong and Howard started to feel left out.

He found it even harder to be at home and worked even longer hours and the resentment grew.

Because he felt sidelined, he became crueler to Laura, criticized her parenting when Daniel cried on the weekends at this man whom he didn’t recognize, who picked him up.

Then one evening, after Daniel had started university, Laura was at home while Howard went out for a drink.

“Just someone from the club,” he said.

It had harpooned her unexpectedly, when she was filling the kettle with water, a sudden, swift plunge to the heart and she dumped the kettle in the sink while she fought to breathe again.

For she suddenly knew who someone from the club was.

Marianne was back, now that their respective children had grown.

And then she remembered he’d been out with someone from the club the week before.

Before that, she couldn’t remember and panicked while she wracked her brain.

After the revelation had subsided, she felt exhausted, beaten; she knew it was because those two were still in love.

Gradually “golf” had spread to whole weekends and she saw him less and less.

Occasionally she considered whether she should ask him for a divorce, but it didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.

Even though she knew Howard was the cause of the loneliness, facing up to it, breaking them apart, would only make the wound open and raw.

She’d always preferred to concentrate on other things.

Daniel had been at the center of her life for so long, and now she was secretly thrilled with the notion that he’d found someone special, someone she might be able to be friends with.

“Daniel’s out again tonight.”

“I assumed as much.”

“That’s the third night in a row.”

He still hadn’t looked up from the paper and let out a small laugh. “He’s a grown man.”

She suppressed her frustration. “Yes, of course. He’s with a girl.”

Finally Howard looked at her. “Good for him.”

She smiled. “I think he’s smitten. They only met three days ago. And he’s seen her every night since.”

“What’s your point?”

“Oh, come on, Howard. Don’t you want to know who this girl is who’s swept him off his feet?”

“You obviously do.”

“Maybe I’ll text him.”

“Don’t you dare,” he whip-cracked.

Hurt, she paused, with the fork midway to her mouth. “I’m joking. ”

“Leave him alone. Just because for the first time in his life, you don’t know every detail. Don’t interfere.”

“I’m not interfering,” she said quietly, and suddenly wanted to leave the room. She put her napkin down on the table and got up. She was about to take her plate to the kitchen when—

“You’re obsessive”—it was sudden, blunt—“possessive.”

She stopped dead.

Neither of them said anything for a moment; then he got up from the table and left.

Laura stood there, her plate in her hand.

Tears pricked at her eyes, not just at the shock of the accusation, but because of the look he’d given her as he left.

It was a look of deep resentment. She sat for a moment, and then as if to stop his words settling on her somehow, she stood again quickly and walked into the kitchen.

She knew better than to follow him; he’d gone to the den and, anyway, she didn’t feel like confronting him, wasn’t in the mood for an argument .

The plate clattered on the counter and then the anger and indignation at what he’d said came out.

He was the one who had made himself absent all those years.

What did he know about the mammoth job of bringing up a child?

The all-encompassing care when they were tiny, the lack of sleep, the wiping of cheeks, hands, bums, tables, high chairs, wipe, wipe, wipe.

The inability to go to the bathroom by yourself, the absolute knowledge that one hug from you would soothe the bumps and bruises, and those hugs had to be always available.

The constant reverse psychology /humor/diversion tactics required to get through an average day with a toddler.

He’d never had to deal with, or suffer, the heartrending tears when they didn’t want to go to nursery school or try to work out why, when their four-year-old reasoning couldn’t explain they found it difficult to have the confidence to make friends.

He hadn’t had to make the decisions over sports, clubs, and parties, or work out how to strike the balance between encouraging independence, without making their son feel he was unsupported, or solve the night terrors after the sudden death of his grandfather from a heart attack.

What did he know about any of this? She felt a rage at his appalling shortsightedness; and then with a glass of wine, the anger subsided.

Nobody knew any of this, nobody but a mother.

She picked up her wine and found her book by the fridge and took them into the darkening garden.

The jasmine was beautifully pungent, its hundreds of tiny white starlike flowers just breaking out now that June had arrived.

She lit the citronella candles and soon the moths came to investigate.

As she sat in the swing seat, she let her mind drift.

It was funny thinking back—it had been practically just the two of them for years, and now Daniel was on the verge of moving out permanently.

She was suddenly reminded of something he used to say when he was three.

He’d pretend to be a puppy and bound around her.

“Woof!” he’d say. “Do you like him?”

“He’s gorgeous.”

“You can keep him if you want.”

“Can I? ”

“You can keep him forever.” And he’d throw his arms around her neck tightly.

The cat came mewing pitifully, his tail like a toilet brush, and she saw a fox sniffing around the large opaque window in the middle of the lawn that formed part of the ceiling of the subterranean pool room.

Moses jumped onto her lap and stood there, still meowing and waiting for salvation.

She’d originally gotten him for Daniel when her son was nine, to teach him about looking after pets.

He was a small silver-gray Burmese and she’d ended up growing quite fond of him.

Picking up a small stone, she threw it in the direction of the fox; she disliked them, was wary of their capabilities and lack of boundaries.

Recently she’d heard a distraught, incredulous woman call into a radio breakfast show talking about how a fox had brazenly walked in through the open back door and climbed into her baby’s cot in the middle of the day.

She shuddered. If that had been Daniel when he was small, she would have probably smashed the fox’s head against the patio.

Three nights in a row, she thought with a smile.

Who sees someone three nights in a row right off?

What did this girl have that was so special?

As she mused about Cherry, she thought about another girl, a girl a tiny bit older than Daniel.

Rose was Laura’s firstborn. She’d been the perfect baby, eating and sleeping right on schedule from day one.

Which was why it had been so unusual when at only a few days old, Laura had had difficulty waking her to nurse.

When it happened again three hours later, Laura was worried enough to take her to the doctor.

He took one look at her and she was rushed to hospital.

She was diagnosed with group B streptococcus, contracted from undetected bacteria in the birth canal.

After twenty-four hours, the doctors told them Rose was going to die, and two hours later she did, in Laura’s arms. She was exactly seven days old.

The guilt had almost broken her, and their marriage.

Laura was consumed with the thought of whether Rose would have survived if she’d gone to the doctors when she’d slept through her first feeding.

The thing that saved them both was her getting pregnant again.

Ten months later, when Daniel was born, Laura had vowed to whichever presence might be listening that she’d devote her life to this tiny creature and never let anything happen to him. And in return, could he be kept safe?

The cat lowered itself onto her soft thighs, half-closing his eyes in relief at the fox’s disappearance and Laura stroked his fur.

He watched the demented moths with occasional darting eyes, but was either too lazy or tired to actually do anything about them.

As Laura swung gently in the seat, she thought fondly of this girl she’d not yet met, this girl who was the same age her own daughter would have been.