Matt, like me, had an unconventional background. He had never said much to me about his parents. Although, as far as he knew, they were both still alive, he had not spoken to either of them for fourteen years. He did not like to talk about what had caused the rift between them and him, but he had told me that he had vowed long ago that he would never get married, both because of their disastrous union and because he would hate his absolute lack of a family to be as apparent as it would have been, at the ceremony. He had always told me that we did not need a piece of paper when we had each other, and that Alice was far more of a bond than a marriage certificate could ever be.
I knew that was true. Nonetheless, my family was unconventional as well, and I knew that he had enough friends to fill a few seats at a registry office. I had suggested a tiny ceremony with witnesses off the street, but he had turned me down.
Our strange family situations had bonded us in the first place, when we met in Brighton. We had recognised something in each other. Matt had never told me exactly what had happened between him and his parents and I had never told him more than the barest details about my mother.
‘Have you phoned Christa?’ he asked suddenly. ‘She’ll be frantic if you haven’t.’
‘She won’t be frantic.’
‘Ring her. She’ll blame me if you don’t.’
‘OK.’ I looked at him and smiled. ‘I’ll tell her it’s brilliant.’
Hugh tried to work out exactly when he had started hating himself, and when he had stopped. With reflection, he could pinpoint the precise moment when it had started. Just over three years ago, two women had sat him down, separately, within the space of six weeks, and each one had told him that she was pregnant with his child. Both of them had been delighted. Both had looked at him expectantly, watching eagerly for his reaction. Both times he had composed himself quickly, made his mouth smile a little. Each time he had said the same thing:
‘But I thought we said we weren’t thinking about children yet?’
The first time it had been a terrible shock. He had hoped it might be a joke; then, when it wasn’t, he had prayed for a miscarriage. If Emma’s pregnancy had ended naturally, he would have taken the divine hint and sorted his life out. That had not happened. The second time had been worse. He had been psyching himself up to leave Jo, to regularise his affairs and settle down to his new responsibilities. When Jo had made her announcement, he had hoped that perhaps she might have been lying, testing him. Jo liked games. But she wasn’t. Eight months later, his son had been born.
He had hated himself for a year or so. He had called himself weak, pathetic, unkind, unfair. He had known he was a bastard. His brother had been so horrified that he almost admired him. Nobody else knew. He acknowledged he was going to be found out one day, but after a year of waiting for it to happen, he had decided, unilaterally, to forgive himself. This was the way his life had turned out, and so, while it lasted, he was going to play along with it. He knew he was a coward, but he had told himself so many times that this was the only way to keep everybody happy that he almost believed he was doing the right thing.
There had been several scares. A few times he had been so close to being found out that he could still barely believe he was getting away with it. Once he had been walking on Hampstead Heath with two-month-old Olly in the sling when he had spotted Emma’s battleaxe of an aunt out walking with her moronic husband. He had ducked out of the way and, astonishingly, they hadn’t seen him. At least, he assumed they hadn’t. Several times Jo had offered to meet him ‘at the airport’, when, in fact, he had only come up from Brighton. A couple of times he had got off the train at Gatwick and rushed into the airport, picked up some perfume and chocolate, and milled around looking for her. The worst of all, however, had been Jo’s sudden announcement that they had to move to Brighton. That was what had prompted the shift to France. She had set her heart on leaving London and opening a second gallery on the south coast. Hugh had almost instantly got Emma to put her house on the market. Then one of Jo’s artists had given Jo the house listings magazine, and she had, inevitably, honed in on Emma’s place. She had drawn a firm ring round it, and asked him to go and look at it with her. He had wriggled out of it by pretending to phone the estate agent and pretending that he’d been told it was under offer, but that had been the moment when he had known he was on borrowed time.
His unusual situation no longer shocked him. From time to time he saw cover lines on women’s magazines, and sometimes he smiled to himself. ‘My love-rat husband had secret family.’ He sometimes picked up a magazine and flicked through the article in question, finding some perverse solidarity with a fellow bastard. Those magazines would have loved his story. At least he knew that, if he ever did get found out, neither woman would ever consider making his behaviour public. They had more dignity than that.
As he kissed his girlfriend and his daughter goodbye, he wondered whether he had made things better or worse by forcing them to move to France. Tearing Emma away from her home in Brighton had been painful. She had been so settled there that he had never imagined he would succeed in doing it, but he had had no choice, and so his will had prevailed. Jo was stronger than he was, and he was stronger than Emma, so it made sense that Emma was the one who had to be shifted. Once he had started his campaign, it had been surprisingly easy. He refused to let himself analyse this. He knew that Emma had come to France for no other reason than because she loved him. She would literally have done anything for him and Alice.
Now he was leaving her there. It was time for him to pay his dues back on the other side of the Channel.
Emma pulled herself in, close to him, into his treacherous shoulder where she imagined she was safe. She clung for a few seconds, then released him.
‘You look after each other,’ he told them both solemnly. ‘Be good. Be careful. Lock the door at night. It’s not long till Wednesday.’ Then he gave Alice a last kiss, disentangled her arms from around his neck, got in the car and slammed the door.
‘They will be all right here,’ he muttered as he started the engine and waved to them both. There was a light drizzle in the air. They stood by the gate, getting wet, and he drove away.
‘They will be fine,’ he repeated. Emma was always going to be fine. She was one of life’s copers. He was pleased, now, that they had had the baby. He was glad that Emma had a focus other than him. Whatever happened in the future, Emma would be all right. She was a natural mother, and she would always have Alice. If things went well in France, he thought, they might even have another child. Perhaps they would do it properly, this time.
Hugh drove out of the hamlet, waving cheerfully to the lady who lived by the church. Martine. She stared intently at him for a full five seconds before her face cleared with recognition, and she returned his wave enthusiastically. Hugh smiled to himself. How many other people drive around Pounchet in British-registered cars in February? he wondered. The woman, Martine, had already been over to the house to welcome them to the village. She would make sure Emma and Alice were all right during his many absences.
As he left the tiny hamlet, and then their local town, St Paul, behind him, his excitement began to mount. He often surfed from one life to the other on a wave of adrenaline. He felt his guts bubbling with anticipation, thrilled that nobody involved had any idea about his secret. It was going to be much more clear cut now that he was taking a plane between his two lives. He would step onto the aeroplane as Matt, and step off it as Hugh.
Hugh was genuinely excited that half his life would now be in France. He had wanted this. He had wanted something different, had come to be exhausted by dashing from one part of the south of England to another. He was not going to keep this up for long because of the fucking money, but he reckoned he could manage a year. That was his deadline. He could live this double life for a year, and then he was going to have to decide. A year was optimistic. A year meant calling various credit cards into play and cutting down on extravagances, but he could do it. Thinking of it as a year meant that the decision, the showdown, was a comfortingly long way off.
He was tentatively assuming that when his year was up he would leave Jo and make the France thing permanent. Admittedly, the new life had not got off to a good start. Hugh smiled to himself as he sped away from it, in relief at the certain knowledge that he was not going to spend that night pretending to be comfortable on a lilo that, even when fully inflated, plunged down to meet the stone-tiled floor as soon as he lay on it. At least his weight see-sawed Emma and Alice high into the air. They had genuinely slept. He had been sure of it. Alice, at least, was incapable of pretending.
Tonight, he would sleep in an obscenely comfortable queen-sized bed, under a thick duvet, with his beautiful wife next to him. He switched the radio on and sang along with Otis Redding. ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay.’ He was a bastard, and he got away with it because his behaviour was out of character. He was not one of life’s natural bastards. He was an accidental bastard. He hummed as he drove through miles and miles of pine forests, towards Bordeaux.
He parked in the medium-stay car park, locked his car, and headed for the terminal. Once there, he used the phone card he had already bought to call Emma and Alice.
‘Darling!’ he said to Emma. ‘How are you two? OK so far?’
‘Oh Matt!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re a bit lost without you. It’s Daddy,’ she added as an aside. ‘How was the drive? Is the flight on time?’
He reassured her on both fronts, although he hadn’t checked about the flight.
She chatted, barely pausing for breath, eager to keep him on the phone for as long as she could. She went over her plans for the next few days. She would try to enrol Alice in the local school. She would chase up the builders and the architect. Matt loved the fact that she had refrained from pointing out to him that their much-fanfared emigration was, so far, utterly miserable. That the house was terrible, the weather was terrible, that she was already horribly lonely because he had removed her from everything that had always held her together. She should have been screaming at him. Luckily, Emma did not do screaming. She would go to any lengths to avoid confrontation, and this was what made his lifestyle possible. He castigated himself, again, for taking advantage of her sweet nature.
Then he made a second call.
‘Darling!’ he said, with exactly the same inflection he had used when he called Emma. ‘It’s me. Not too bad at all. I’ll be home around seven, with any luck. I’ll call from Gatwick. Love you both.’
Hugh was surprised at how pleased he was to be back in London. Everything was familiar and easy, here. He took the Gatwick Express to Victoria, marvelling at the rush-hour crowds on the station. He bought a paper and a coffee and forced his way onto a packed tube train. He changed onto the High Barnet branch of the northern line at King’s Cross, and got off the train at Highgate. From Highgate station, he walked through the rain for ten minutes, swinging his carrier bag of guilt-stricken airport presents, and turned left into Highcroft Road. He stood outside a tall brick house and gave himself his customary pep talk.
He inhaled slowly, and marched up the steps, pushed a hand through his wet hair, and put his key in the door marked 24A.
‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Anyone here? I’m back!’
Oliver’s footsteps thundered towards him from the direction of the kitchen.
‘Daddy!’ shouted the boy, and he ran headlong into Hugh’s arms. Hugh caught him, kissed his creamy cheek, and tousled his blond hair. He was glad, once again, that Alice looked like her mother. Oliver was the image of himself. Hugh derived some perverse sense of security from the fact that his children did not look like brother and sister.
‘Olly!’ he said. ‘What have you been up to?’
The boy ignored the question. ‘You got a present?’ he demanded.
Hugh looked at his wife, who had followed their son out of the kitchen, and raised his eyebrows. ‘Nice to see you, too, Ol,’ he said. ‘Surely he’s too young to be Thatcher’s child? Shouldn’t he be pleased to see me for my own sake?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with Thatcher,’ Jo told him crisply, pushing her blonde hair back from her face. ‘It’s your own fault. You always bring a present. You made him associate you coming home with him making some material gain. You instilled the covetousness.’ Jo, Hugh reflected, did do confrontation. He liked the fact that she took no crap from him. He also liked the fact that Emma always wanted to make everything smooth and, as she constantly said, magical. He loved them both, although they were so different, and felt comfortable with them both, and they both made him happy. And he was weak and could barely believe his luck. That was the trouble.
‘True,’ he told Jo, dumping his things and rummaging through a tax-free plastic bag. It didn’t mention Bordeaux on it. He had checked very carefully.
‘And as it happens I do have a little something for each of you,’ he told them. ‘But can’t a man take his coat off and get a drink when he comes back from supporting his family, before he has to start handing out the knick-knacks?’
Jo patted his cheek. She was looking beautiful in jeans and a crisp white shirt. He knew she didn’t do it for his benefit. ‘Don’t play the martyr. Don’t pretend you don’t love the travelling. Spending half the week lounging in Novotels on expenses. Watching the porn channels and eating lukewarm chips from room service.’ She kissed him on the lips and he returned her kiss, placing a hand on her waist and pulling her tall, slender body close to his.
Hugh muttered into her ear, ‘You haven’t mentioned that I don’t particularly support the family yet.’
‘You partly support the family,’ Jo told him, generously, as she pulled away from him. She was a confident woman with short, sharply styled blonde hair. Jo worked full time, running a successful art gallery. She made more than enough money to keep the three of them comfortably. Hugh had been in infatuated awe of Jo from the moment they met, and he still was. He thought she was far out of his league.