‘Sure,’ he said. He looked somewhat bemused.
‘The grass is growing quite fast now,’ I told him. ‘Did I tell you about my lawnmower?’
He frowned. ‘That old lawnmower in the shed?’
‘No! That’s rubbish. It takes me eight hours to cut the grass with it, and I’d never get it over those brambles.’ I gestured to the wilderness area. I was slightly affronted that Matt had not mentioned the progress I had made in cutting back the jungle while he had been away. The brambles, nettles and thick grass were now less than a foot high, and I thought that the red tractor mower I had ordered would be able to cope with them. ‘I ordered a proper mower and I’d like to get a strimmer too. Save a lot of time and stress with the scythe.’
Matt nodded. ‘You’re barmy,’ he said mildly. ‘But I love you. You’re doing a strangely great job with this garden. Have you been possessed by the spirit of garden obsession? Am I going to have to get you exorcised?’
‘Is it a benign spirit?’
He put his arms round me and pulled me in close. We fitted together perfectly, my head against his shoulder. ‘As benign as can be,’ he whispered.
‘No need for exorcism then, is there?’ I whispered back. He said nothing; just shook his head.
In the evening we put Alice to bed in her own bedroom, with Gavin the bear whom she had requisitioned. Matt read her far more stories than I usually did. I cooked onion soup and listened to his voice drifting down through the floorboards. I could make out the cadences but not the individual words.
Then he came down. I got the fire going, while Matt opened a bottle of red wine. We sat in our chairs, looked at each other, and sighed simultaneously.
‘OK?’ asked Matt.
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘Tired, but fine.’
‘The trouble with you,’ Matt said lazily, ‘is that you’re always fine. Nothing troubles you for long, does it?’
I laughed. I was pleased that Matt saw me like this. He was wrong, but this was the way I had always wanted people to see me. ‘I suppose not,’ I said, playing along.
‘Equable, that’s what you are, Emma. So, what don’t you like?’
I looked at him. ‘What do you mean, what don’t I like?’
‘Name some things you don’t like.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘I don’t like war. Or famine. Or other things like that. I don’t like inequality or racism or sexism. There’s lots I don’t like.’
Matt laughed and drained his wine. ‘Let’s move away from Miss World territory. I want to hear you being nasty. What don’t
you
, Emma Meadows, like? What do you hate? What drives you mad?’
I hesitated. ‘I don’t like Margaret Thatcher.’
‘Passé. And unoriginal.’
‘George Bush?’
‘Ditto. What don’t you like in your own little world?’ He gestured around our living room. ‘You have to be microcosmic. And specific.’
I was uncomfortable, because I was not quite sure what Matt was trying to make me say. ‘I don’t like the fact that the builders haven’t shown up yet even though we’ve got planning permission. I don’t like that stone cladding around the fireplace. I don’t like feeling stupid. I don’t like uncertainty. You know that. I don’t like too much change. I don’t like drinking and I don’t like being out of control. I certainly don’t like giving birth, although I wouldn’t mind giving it another go.’
He sighed. ‘Emma. I’m trying to make you be mean. I’m trying to make you wicked. Try harder. Say something bitchy. What do you see around you that makes you think nasty thoughts?’
A surprising number of things that I could never have admitted to. Mentally, I ran through a list of things that brought out my nasty side and settled on the most innocuous. ‘I hate wet-look hair gel,’ I told him triumphantly. ‘One of the checkout women in Intermarché wears it.’ I did not mention the fact that, as well as hair gel, I could easily hate a large number of people. I hated people who had it easy. I hated lazy people, thin people, successful people. I hated Charlotte and the way she lived her life. I hated Matt for not telling me what had happened between him and his parents; I hated him for holding so much of himself back from me. I hated Alice, sometimes, for her constant demands. I hated my aunt for not being my mother, and for not being maternal enough towards me, and I hated my uncle Geoff for not being my father, although I quite liked him in every other way. Above all, I despised my mother for leaving me.
I looked at Matt, smiling. He had his head in his hands. ‘Everyone hates bloody wet-look gel.’
‘Perms, too,’ I added brightly. ‘Specially corkscrew ones. What about you?’
Matt stood up and walked to the window. He opened it and closed the shutters. ‘Me? I hate everything. I hate beggars even though it’s not their fault. I really hate those charity mugger twats who stop you everywhere in London to try and get your bank details off you. I hate people who don’t know how to order properly in restaurants. I hate people who drink during the day and get rowdy and obnoxious. I hate pushchairs in busy shops even though we have a pushchair and we have been known to take it into busy shops. I hate people who use the automatic doors or the lift when they haven’t got a pushchair and are perfectly able bodied, thus clogging it up for those who actually need it. I hate things that make me feel guilty. I hate cheating and dishonesty. I hate people with hard skin on their feet who wear sandals, forcing me to look at their ugly heels.’ He sat back down with a smile. ‘I could go on.’
I laughed, and frowned at him. ‘So how ought one to order in restaurants?’ I asked. ‘Do I do it properly, or do you hate me?’ I put some fingers inside my sock and stroked the sole of my foot. There was some hard skin there. But I had my scarring, so I never wore open sandals anyway. I did not want my future husband — my fiancé — to hate my feet.
‘I’m talking about smart restaurants. If you’re in a smart restaurant, then the person who’s paying should ask everyone what they want before the waiter comes, then place the order for the whole group.’
I laughed. ‘You’re joking! I never knew that. You actually care about that? Is it some obscure form of etiquette?’
‘It’s the way it should be done. And while we’re at it the loo roll should hang with the sheets in front, not behind.’
I shrugged. ‘OK.’
‘Right. Now you’re making me feel I’m a petty misanthrope. I was trying to make you admit that you’re not sweetness and light through and through, but it hasn’t worked. Four years after meeting you, I’m still searching for the chink in your armour. My partner, the perfect human being.’
I smiled at him. ‘You have no idea.’
On Sunday night, I opened Matt’s bag, which was already packed for his early flight in the morning, and I slipped in a picture that Alice had done for him. It was exuberant and splodgy, with lumps of glitter glue in it. I had written underneath exactly what she had said after she painted it:
A picture of Alice and Mummy and Daddy and our new house in France.
Then I had written,
We miss you x x x x x
I imagined him opening his bag in his dark, gloomy flat and finding it in there. I pictured the smile that would spread across his face. I saw him propping it up on a dusty mantelpiece, and decided that I was going to hide a surprise for him every week. That way he could brighten up his flat, and it would mean that we would always be with him.
Hugh was feeling the pressure. He was uneasy almost all the time. The weekend in Paris had been excruciating. The most excruciating thing, if he was honest, was the fact that he had enjoyed it so much. He had presented the façade of a life to Jo and he was fairly sure that she had had no suspicions. He had bought her champagne at every opportunity, to distract her from the vague way he talked about his life here, and the convenient cancellation of those vital meetings. They had strolled around the Musée D’Orsay, guiltily taken in a few of the
Da Vinci Code
sites (pretending to each other that St Sulpice was simply one of the architectural splendours of the city, and that this was the sole reason for their visit), and they had surveyed the city from the top of the Eiffel Tower. It had been fun. Jo was always good company.
All the same, it had thrown him off kilter. He was massively poor now. He could not keep this up until January if Jo was going to throw surprises like that at him. As he had predicted, he had ended up paying for everything. He had felt horrible when he had spoken to Emma, and he had missed Alice like crazy. He was angry with Jo now and couldn’t help snapping at her when, normally, he was amenable and agreeable. For fuck’s sake. She had given him no choice. He felt, unreasonably, that she had had no right to do it. She had had no right to make him have a wonderful weekend in Paris when he was meant to be with Emma.
Emma had not questioned him staying away that weekend. She had always been easy to dupe because she had a far more pliant personality. Hugh felt worse about deceiving Emma than he did about Jo. Jo was a powerful, confident woman, where Emma was vulnerable. He knew that he could have told anything to Emma and she would have believed him. Now she thought they were getting married. He had talked about it because he had wanted to see her smile. He thought that procrastination was the only way to play that one. In January, he half intended to divorce Jo and marry Emma instead. He wondered whether he could get his divorce without Emma knowing anything about it. There was, of course, that line about a man marrying his mistress and creating a vacancy, but it wouldn’t be like that. It wasn’t his nature to be like that. This was an exceptional situation.
Hugh was reading a bedtime story to Olly. They were reading about the Elephant and the Bad Baby. Hugh could have read this in his sleep. Jo had bought it for Olly because she remembered it from her childhood. When Olly had become attached to it, Hugh had bought a copy for Alice. Both children were intermittently obsessed with the naughty elephant.
Olly slumped onto Hugh’s chest, and twisted round to see the book. Hugh had his arm round Oliver’s narrow shoulders. Olly was much taller than Alice, even though she was older than he was. She had been born, a week late, five and a half weeks before Olly had arrived on his due date. It had been typically efficient of Jo to give birth on the correct day, Hugh had thought at the time. He cringed at the memory. That had been a hairy time for him. He had fully expected to be found out and to be forced to abandon one of his children, or, more likely, both of them.
Then he had discovered that new mothers turned inwards, that their every second was spent concentrating on the milky bundles of baby. He came and went. Whichever house he went to, he was greeted with joy, and was told every detail about the relevant baby’s day. He had realised that, in a way, fathering these children had been a masterstroke. Now the women weren’t focused on him any more. They were obsessed with their offspring instead.
Before it had all happened, he had been a married man behaving badly, enjoying himself, stringing Emma along because he was taken with her. He felt comfortable with her, he had been touched by the way she had looked up to him and loved him. He had never intended much to come of it.
When he met her in Brighton, he had been feeling playful. He had walked over to her for no other reason than out of curiosity, because she was the woman who had broken Pete’s heart. He had used his middle name on a whim. Emma had looked at him with trusting brown eyes and had stupidly judged him to be safe. He had liked the way she smiled at him, and he’d sensed that she would be unquestioningly loyal and devoted. He had also been engaged in an unkind game with Peter. He had been overjoyed, in the meanest sense possible, by his effortless seduction of the famous Emma, the woman who had rejected Pete on a daily basis for years, to the point where he had cut his wrists and bled all over her (‘Mmm,’ Hugh had told him, just after the event. ‘Good strategy. She’ll come round now.’ She had, in fact, responded by pouring boiling water on Pete’s feet, and Hugh had not blamed her.)
He had known from the start that, unlike most of his temporary conquests, she would not have come near him if she had known he was married, so he had never mentioned it. He had been experimenting, seeing how great his powers of attraction could be. He had also been trying to piss Pete off. In that, he had succeeded with honours.
It had been fun, having two women on the go. Pete had been shocked at the way he was deceiving Emma, but although he could have stopped Hugh’s games at any time by telling her the truth, he had held back. In a way, Hugh knew, Pete had been pleased to see Emma being duped into a relationship that was bound to end with her being terribly hurt. Pete had been horrified and delighted to gain that sort of revenge on her. He said he was over her now, but Matt knew that he was angrily in love with her, in spite of everything.
Hugh had found himself spending half the week in Brighton, at Emma’s house, and the other half in London in his marital home. He liked waking up twisted around Emma, and looking at the light coming through her blinds onto the ceiling, and hearing the seagulls screeching. He also liked waking with Jo in their bedroom, which at Jo’s behest, was entirely white. She had sanded the floorboards and painted them white with some special sort of paint, and there were white curtains and white bedlinen. He had laughed at the idea, but in fact it was lovely. He had been happy with both of them.
Then it had happened. He must have been going through a particularly fertile time.
‘Strong swimmers,’ Pete had said. He had not approved, had not wanted Emma to be hurt to this extent. Hugh could not possibly have left Emma when she was pregnant and happy, and there was no way he was going to leave Jo and have her hate him for ever. He wanted to know his children. He wanted to be in both their lives. There was nothing he could do but attempt to cover his tracks and see what happened. He still pretended to himself that there was no other option.
He had watched the two women he loved going through childbirth within six weeks of each other, and he had realised why monogamy was a cultural norm. It had almost been too much for him. Jo thought her labour had been hard, because it had taken twenty-four hours and had needed a ventouse and stitches. But she had had an epidural as soon as she had taken her coat off and had been laughing with him and chatting on the phone for most of the birth. Emma’s labour with Alice still haunted him. She had struggled for forty hours, using just gas and air and a birthing pool, until the baby’s heartbeat had started accelerating then slowing, and suddenly the room had filled up with doctors and a resuscitation table and all sorts of implements. They cut Emma’s perineum, and yanked Alice out with forceps. She was blue. As they whisked her away, Hugh had been petrified. Emma was gripping his hand, and he had decided, in that second, that he was going to leave Jo and lead an honest life. But the baby was fine, he had a daughter, and he left things as they were.