Unfaithful Read online

  ‘So that’s a no?’ he said, disappointed. Perhaps I was wrong about the sex.

  ‘We should just get back,’ I said, putting a consolatory hand on his knee.

  We sank back into silence as I watched the motorway lights flip over us. Light, then dark. Light, then dark, the lump in my chest constant as I played back a rush of random memories of Dylan, like those highlight compilations they played when a reality TV contestant was evicted from their fake house or jungle. I could see the little girl who scoured every beach for oysters, hoping to find a pearl, the child who built her own writing den at the bottom of our garden, where she’d disappear for hours with her notebooks and survival kit stuffed with sweets, cuddly toys and torches. I turned to the window to hide my glistening eyes from Robert.

  The streetlights had gone now, our headlights cutting into the gathering night, and I knew it was time. Time for the conversation I’d been rehearsing for weeks.

  ‘You know I’ve been thinking,’ I said, trying to keep my tone light, my eyes fixed on the scarlet glow of the taillights ahead. ‘About going back to work.’

  ‘Work?’ he said, turning on some music.

  ‘You know I put my career on hold when Dylan came along,’ I said, trying not to rush the script. ‘But it was never meant to be permanent, was it? I was only ever meant to stay at home until Dilly went to school. But it didn’t work out like that.’

  Even now, it was hard to believe where the time had gone. Once Dylan had started school, we’d decided that I needed to be around just for the first few years to be there for parents’ evenings, supervising homework and ferrying her to clubs and play-dates. But then I needed to see her through the eleven plus, then getting her GCSEs …

  I stopped myself, slightly ashamed at the drab, linear description of my life. Was that it? A wedding, a baby, then a series of coffee mornings and taxi runs? Had my existence on the planet been measured in bake sales? I wasn’t exactly sure if we’d ever actually ‘agreed’ that I would stay home to look after Dylan, but that’s what had happened. Eighteen years, gone by in a blink.

  ‘And now, well. She doesn’t need me anymore. I’m freed up for other things,’ I said, my voice cracking slightly.

  ‘What about Bill and Iris?’ said Robert glancing across.

  I looked at him, not sure I’d heard correctly. Bill and Iris? I hadn’t expected Robert to greet my idea of going back to work with whoops of excitement. My husband looked good for his age, and had a wardrobe of expensive clothes that reflected his position as CEO of a property firm, a mover and shaker around the capital. But deep down, Robert Reeves was still a traditional, conservative man. I knew he liked the status quo, Him as the striver, the provider, me as the homemaker, sweeping out the cave. No, that wasn’t fair. But neither had he ever suggested I go back to work. And anyway, what did our elderly neighbours have to do with any of this?

  Eight years ago, when we had moved into Robert’s dream house in Highgate, we knew we had ‘arrived’. My husband’s property business was flying, the market was booming and Highgate Village had felt like a jump to another level from our previous home in Crouch End. The house we designed and built was beautiful: modernist, open plan, all glass and steel. We had fantasized that our neighbours would be pretentious novelists or avant-garde architects, only half-joking when we said we’d be sucked into a world of dinner parties where the hosts wore polo necks and thick-rimmed spectacles. That hadn’t happened. Instead, we got Bill and Iris.

  Bill was ninety – or rather, he was ninety now. Back then, he’d seemed older. Mostly deaf and partially sighted, Bill had shuffled around on that first day to loudly complain about the moving van blocking his drive. I could sympathize: the two years we’d spent on the building project before we moved in probably hadn’t endeared us to them. Iris was two years older than her husband and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. We had the impression that in her earlier life, Iris had been a formidable woman. She certainly had plenty of opinions when she spoke up.

  ‘Bill and Iris?’ I repeated. ‘Haven’t you spent the last few years telling me I was wasting my time on them?’

  ‘I never said that. I know how much they rely on you.’

  That much was true. About three years earlier I’d made the mistake of stepping in to help them. I say a mistake, I was glad to assist – ordering their supermarket deliveries, running them to the odd hospital appointment. At first it had felt good to take some responsibility, but there had been a slow creep of more and more requests and now, without really planning it, I had taken on the role of de facto daughter.

  ‘I need to cut the cord, Robert,’ I said as firmly as I could.

  ‘Cut the cord?’

  ‘I’m practically their full-time carer.’

  ‘I think that’s an exaggeration.’

  ‘How do you know?’ My frustration was rising. ‘You’re not at home most of the day. You don’t know how much I do and how much they expect me to do.’

  ‘Come on, Rach, they’re nice people.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I snapped.

  He let that hang in the air for a moment, as if he was thinking.

  ‘Maybe you need to speak to what’s-his-name, their nephew John? Maybe you could suggest they pay you?’

  ‘We can’t ask for money.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. You are literally saving them thousands, hundreds of thousands of pounds keeping them out of a home. One of the guys at work was telling me that he’d worked out it would be cheaper to house his mum at Claridges than the care place she’s currently at.’

  ‘I can’t, Robert,’ I said, not wanting to back down now. ‘Anyway, going back to work is a win-win. I start to use my brain again, and I can back off from Bill and Iris. It’s awkward otherwise.’

  ‘But what would you do?’ Robert said.

  His question irritated me, but still, there was a chink of hope, the possibility I was winning him round.

  ‘What I used to do. Publishing.’

  He gave a cynical glance.

  ‘I think a lot has changed a lot since you left.’

  He wasn’t trying to be unkind but still I bristled.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The world’s changed, Rach. Twenty years ago, people bought hardback books. No one had even heard of an eBook back then. Now it’s all digital and audio, and all those supermarket promotions you used to do? I mean, does anyone even go to the supermarket anymore?’

  ‘People still want great stories, well told, and I was always good at finding those.’

  I hated the sound of my voice, the begging tone. And I hated the very idea I needed my husband’s permission to do something I wanted this much.

  ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said.

  ‘Later? How about now?’ I said, pushing back.

  ‘I’m tired. It’s been a long day and we’re feeling emotional as it is.’

  ‘Robert …’

  ‘No, Rach. Please, not now.’

  He glanced across and I knew that look. The matter was settled and he had made his decision. I turned back to the dark window, biting my tongue, biding my time. The world had changed; he was right about that. But I had to change too.

  Chapter 3

  The house was quiet. So quiet I could hear the tick-tick of pipes cooling and the press of the wind on the floor-to-ceiling glass. I knew the exact timings of aeroplanes passing overhead – every ninety seconds – and a car pulling up in the street got me dashing straight to the window. That first week, I could tell you exactly who had a delivery and who used Uber. It hadn’t been like that when Dylan was in the house, when she had been constantly playing music, watching videos at top volume or chatting to me about whatever random thought popped into her head. Even when she’d gone out – and once she’d turned sixteen Dilly seemed to be out most of the time – the house still felt different. It felt lived in. But now, it was as if her leaving had sucked all the warmth out of our home, like when you retu
rned from a winter break having forgotten to leave the heating on and the building felt cold to its core. I felt like that too. Empty, neglected, alone.

  If I was being completely honest, I knew that feeling lonely had begun way before we’d packed our daughter’s suitcases and the obligatory pot plant into the car and headed for the M6.

  Robert worked away from home a lot. In any given week, he could be in Singapore, New York or Dubai; global centres of money where he would drum up finance or meet new clients. At the beginning, I always used to be busy too, my life full of people, right from the moment that Dylan had been born. Baby music classes, NCT reunions, swimming lessons, the cult of the new motherhood, new friends bonded by reflux and wet wipes. As she got older there were coffees and gossip about catchment areas and the nursery playground. And once Dilly went to school, to her all-girls prep just off the high street – Robert had been very clear she would be privately educated – my friendship circle grew still. The school gate was the hub and I threw myself into it all – class-repping, volunteering at the summer fair, the PTA and cheering from the side-lines at the hockey and lacrosse matches. There were the weekly coffee mornings in the various village cafés or at the homes of the mums who had a remodel to show off. It was a real-life community and although I was not naturally a loud or gregarious person, I found myself right at the very heart of it.

  But somewhere it stopped. Perhaps when Dylan went up to senior school and somehow the parents didn’t knit together, or didn’t seem to need the reassurance of a group. There was no daily chit-chat at the gates because the girls walked to school or took the bus. Or maybe everyone had enough friends by then. Was friendship like a computer hard drive? At some point it simply said it was ‘full’.

  It didn’t matter at first. There was the old crowd to run with, go to spinning class with, to have lunch. But slowly, that friendship group shrank too. Trudy and Jake were the first to move. Competition for school places was fierce and they literally had to move to the other side of London to get their daughter Tilly into a school that they deemed up to scratch. Others had tired of London life, or realized that for the price of their three-bed terrace they could live like kings outside of the M25 – garden-less homes in Archway swapped for mini manor houses in Kent or mortgage-free cottages by the sea. There was no chance of us joining the exodus – Robert’s business was doing well and he needed to be in striking distance of Zone One. Plus, we loved Highgate and we loved the house. Or Robert did, anyway.

  I looked around now and sighed. Sometimes, I thought he loved the house more than he loved me.

  Building Swain’s House had been Robert’s dream.

  After three years of looking, waiting, the perfect plot had finally come up in a secluded part of the Village. A 1920s detached had been pulled down and in its place, we built a tribute to the Modernist design that my husband so loved. The open plan space was a series of smooth lines built from granite, concrete and cedar wood. From the top two floors there were views over the cemetery, each room decorated in natural shades to complement the cool grey English skies. Every room smelled of Jo Malone, and underfloor heating kept them warm. We had a cinema in the basement, and a glass retracting roof in our en-suite. It was a world away from the small Belfast semi in which I had grown up. It had everything we could need, but nothing that I wanted.

  I pulled my wrap tighter and picked up the phone that was on the kitchen table. I clicked onto Instagram, ignored my feed and went straight to Dylan’s page. My heart contracted as I saw my daughter’s silly, smiling profile photo and her new life in a grid of pictures. A fresh-faced selfie by the lake on the halls of residence campus, a gaggle of girls next to the university clock tower, a row of empty pint glasses on a bar. Nothing new since the last time I’d looked two hours earlier, but even so, it made me feel emotional. The photos were a lifeline to my daughter, but also a reminder that I was now locked out of her world.

  Emotion bubbled in my chest and I told myself to get a grip.

  She was my daughter. I wanted her to go to university, have fun, meet new friends. And although I missed being part of her life so fiercely, my whole body felt hollowed out, a shell, like one of Robert’s building projects, I couldn’t hold her back because of my own neediness.

  I clicked off Instagram but I didn’t let go of the phone. Instead, I scrolled to messages, past all the contacts I never seemed to see or speak to anymore. Serena’s was one of the few numbers I knew off by heart.

  Still on for today?

  I put the mobile back on the breakfast bar and looked at it, waiting for the incoming ping. I began to get restless, panicked, wondering how else I could fill the day if my friend was going to blow me out at the last minute.

  But finally, Serena replied.

  See you at one. Usual place.

  I smiled with relief and I began to get ready.

  Even mid-week, Joules was packed, so I was lucky to grab one of the tables by the window facing the street. I slumped down and tried one of those deep-breathing exercises in a vain attempt to reduce my spiking stress levels. An hour agonizing over the right wardrobe and make-up – not too formal, not too loungewear – half an hour grinding my way into town, and the fifteen-minute walk to the tube. How had I done it every day?

  Because that was eighteen years ago, I reminded myself, looking around the bar at the bright young twenty-somethings. Eighteen years and six months, actually, as I was heavily pregnant with Dylan when they finally dragged me out of the office. The men and women laughing and chatting in Joules looked much the same though: younger, of course, but that same slightly smug look of upwardly mobile media professionals. Sometimes it seemed like yesterday since I was among them, lunching agents and sales reps, but mostly it felt as if I dreamed it.

  A handsome twenty-something walked through the door and waved in my direction. I tried to place him but he wasn’t familiar. He was too young to be a former colleague, too old to be one of Dylan’s friends. I gave a non-committal half-smile not wanting to seem rude, but as he looked straight through me and I heard the sound of a chair scrape behind me, and the sound of happy media air-kissing, I realized that the wave was not meant for me.

  My embarrassment was salvaged by the chirp of a text:

  B there in ten. S x

  I ordered a silver chai, the latest thing, according to Vogue – or was it Tatler? – either way, I wanted to fit in here, desperately wanted to reconnect with this lifestyle, this place. Joules was a Soho institution, it had been the hang-out for the media crowd since Berwick Street and Golden Square had become the centre of creative London in the Eighties and Nineties boom. I’d only seen the tail end of all that, but I’d been a part of it – the gentle hum of lunchtime gossip and office politics moans, the talk of weekends in the Cotswolds or Paris, plans for after-work drinks at The Atlantic bar or yoga classes at some hip, new gym, the idea of which seemed so cutting-edge back then.

  I didn’t want to be invisible anymore. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to belong. I wanted to be part of this scene once more, so much that I could feel the weight of longing pressing on my chest.

  ‘Sweets, how are you?’ said Serena, rushing in and dipping for an air-kiss. ‘Have you been waiting ages? Got tied up in some marketing nonsense.’ She rolled her eyes in that ‘you know how it is’ expression and she was right, I did. Or rather, I could still remember those brightly lit boardrooms with glass tables and cantilever chairs, the crisp shirts, the take-out coffee, Mont Blanc pens twisted in smooth fingers slick with hand-cream. At the time, those meetings had seemed a grind, but right now? Just the memory was making my heart beat harder.

  ‘So, how’s work?’ I asked. ‘Are you snowed under?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Comme ci, comme ca˛. The industry’s going to hell in a handcart, as usual.’

  She leaned forward and whispered. ‘Although between you and me, sales are up 12 per cent year on year in our division, so I’m safe for a few months anyway.’

  I smiled. Typic
al Serena: indiscreet, but with an undercurrent of ‘me, me, me’.

  She was still one of my closest friends despite it. We had started working at Edelman, one of Bloomsbury’s smallest but most prestigious publishing houses in those Nineties glory days when London’s medialand was pulsing. Serena got her job via a well-connected godparent, I’d seen an advertisement for an editorial assistant in the Monday Guardian media pages and miraculously had said all the right things at interview. Twenty-plus years on, our close-knit little company had been folded into BCC, a giant global media concern, and Serena was now a top editor at their biggest commercial imprint, shuttling between London, New York and Frankfurt. And her authors were no longer the type who won critical praise but hardly sold anything, they were the bestsellers – blockbusting thrillers and big-name romances by world renowned authors.

  ‘So, what’s the big book I should be reading?’ I asked, sipping my silver chai.

  Serena waved a vague hand.

  ‘I’m definitely the wrong person to ask; I never read.’

  ‘You never read?’ I laughed.

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Aren’t books your business?’ I smiled.

  She glanced up from the menu. ‘Rach, there’s not enough time in the day to read all the submissions that come in, let alone the ones that actually make it to print.’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘Besides, it’s all about IP these days. No one really cares about the words anymore. It’s the idea, the pithy little concept we can sell on to Netflix.’

  Serena had always been prone to these sorts of pronouncements: splashy headlines with an undercurrent of insider knowledge. Usually I shrugged them off, but today, I was all ears. I was about to ask for more details, but Serena leaned across and laid a hand over mine.

  ‘And how are you holding up?’ she said with a sympathetic tilt of the head. ‘Dylan off to uni and everything?’