After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (23 page)

She stared at me. ‘At least my husband knows the truth about me and has decided to stay anyway. Unlike Mark, he’s had the opportunity to make an informed choice.’

‘Don’t. Don’t do this, Katya.’ I was begging, I could hear it. I couldn’t marry up the woman in front of me, burning up with resentment and spite, with the one who laughed about the mothers at school racing their worn-out offspring from Mandarin to karate to trampolining.

‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s a bit of a day for telling the truth. Why should I be the only one left out, again?’

I felt as though I was leaning on my front door, trying to force an intruder out, to keep my family safe, but ceding tiny increments of space, little by little until inevitably, I’d be slammed into the hall wall, flattened under the weight of superior strength.

Sean stood up. ‘Katya. That’s enough. I don’t know what you’re talking about but let’s stick to the topic in hand, which is what we are going to do about Jamie and Eleanor.’

He sounded so reasonable, so rational that for a tiny moment, I hoped – rather than believed – that we could forget Katya and her insinuations and move into the comparatively more stable area of teenage disaster management.

Katya turned on Sean. ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d love me to toe the bloody line, just as I always do, terrified of rocking the boat in case you do actually leave me. Well, do you know what? I don’t give a shit about that any more. Yes, I had an affair. But maybe you should think a bit about why that was. Or was that ‘all so long ago’ that it doesn’t bloody matter any more?’

She turned to me. ‘For you, though, Lydia, it wasn’t that long ago, was it? September, wasn’t it, some Italian from that Surrey Business Stars thing?’

I’d never really believed that people gasped before. I thought it was something invented in books to denote surprise. But gasp was what Mark did. A strangled, shocked, intake of breath.

I grabbed his arm. ‘Mark, let me explain, it’s not as bad as it sounds.’ I wanted to claim that Katya had made it up, just to be spiteful but how could I? The big lie I’d been living since I was thirteen had spawned a thousand little lies, scattering about like poppy seeds and colonising great tracts of landscape, encroaching a little more on the truth as every year passed.

He shook me off and stood up. He was blinking, as though the scene in front of him was a figment of his imagination and he just needed to refocus. His face was pale, mottled with horror and surprise.

‘I’ll talk to you when we get home, Lydia.’

He marched towards the door.

I grabbed my bag to dash out after him with an explanation, to make the horrible thing nowhere near as bad as it sounded. But in reality, it was worse because Katya didn’t know the half of it, didn’t know that when Jamie was ill, I was oblivious, naked in my hotel room in Florence, thinking only about my own selfish pleasure. It wouldn’t take Mark long to put it all together, though.

Katya put her hands on her hips, her eyes huge in her face as though she’d taken some mind-altering drugs. ‘Before you go, Mark – and you, Lydia – I just want you both to know that if I do find out that Jamie has had sex with my daughter – my
fifteen-year-old
daughter – I will go to the police and press charges.’

I caught Sean’s eye and hesitated for a fraction of a second. He was watchful, as though he was ready to be ambushed from behind.

I faced Katya head-on. ‘Sean slept with me when I was
thirteen
, so we can all play that game.’

I enjoyed a fleeting moment of satisfaction as her mouth gaped open. But she was quick to rally, gathering up her ammunition and flinging her next assault across the room. ‘How are you going to prove that after three decades?’

I really hoped I wouldn’t have to.

T
he next morning
, I cooked scrambled eggs for Jamie. I made toast without the crusts for Izzy. And I held myself together, pulling desperately on the fraying threads of my life to stay upright. In the end, we didn’t need to contact the school because I’d had a call from the headmaster at seven-thirty that morning, asking me to bring Jamie to his office for nine-thirty.

‘Will the McAllisters be there?’

‘You’ll be spoken to separately.’

My eyes were prickly through lack of sleep. I hadn’t seen Mark that morning but I was conscious of him moving about, getting in the shower, the airing cupboard door opening and closing.

Mark hadn’t said a single thing to me when we got home. He’d driven, extra-carefully, threading the steering wheel through his hands like a seventeen-year-old out in his parents’ Volvo for the first time. With his eyes fixed on the road, he refused to acknowledge that I was pleading with him. He went upstairs as soon as we got through the door, leaving me to check on a subdued Jamie.

‘Is Sean furious, Mum?’

‘I think Katya’s more upset than Sean. But it will all seem different in the morning.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s already gone to bed – his stomach was hurting.’

‘Does he hate me, Mum?’

‘Of course he doesn’t. We’re both a bit shocked but we don’t hate you. Quite the opposite.’ Jamie’s misdemeanour was looking negligible compared with my lifetime of messing up. ‘Off to sleep now. Love you.’

I couldn’t hug him. Any human contact would unravel me. I couldn’t wait to get out of his bedroom before someone else realised I wasn’t who they thought I was. He was looking to me to be strong, right at the moment when the entire foundations of my life were juddering like the final cycle of a washing machine.

I crept down the landing and peered round our bedroom door. The light was off and Mark was huddled in a heap under the duvet. I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Can we talk?’

‘Not now. Tomorrow.’ He sounded croaky, as though he was having trouble getting enough air into his lungs.

‘Please.’

‘No. Piss off, Lydia. Just fuck off. I can’t talk to you now.’ There was something in his voice, something so hard and unforgiving, that I didn’t argue. I shuffled off to the spare room, lying flat on my back on the unfamiliar mattress without the slight dip to one side where Mark’s body usually resided. My mind was a labyrinth of self-loathing, flitting between then and now, burrowing among the secrets, the wrong turns, the lies. Regret burnt through me, searing through my body with the familiarity of a well-trodden pathway: lightly covered with brambles and bracken but easily navigated if you knew where to look.

And now, when our marriage was more fragile, more vulnerable than it had ever been, we needed to be united for Jamie.

I was used to getting through things, to finding a face and squeezing my real feelings down to nothing, like spinach wrung dry. But today, over breakfast, with both of my children looking to me to make it right, I was having to remind myself how to move. Giving a semblance of capability for Jamie required so much energy that it was taking me all my time to propel myself between the fridge and kettle. Mark came in, shifting the atmosphere in the kitchen. Whatever there was to play out between us had to wait.

If it could.

I hoped his love for Jamie would surpass his disdain for me. I glanced round. A rush of affection and gratitude stung my eyes, making it harder to seal in my tears. He’d automatically put on a suit and tie without even knowing that we’d been officially summoned. Mark hated formality, ‘poncing about all tuckered up’ and I loved him for doing his best to look like a responsible parent without me having to prompt him.

He didn’t acknowledge me at all. He walked over to Jamie, who was pushing scrambled egg about his plate, put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You all right?’

‘Do you think they’ll expel me?’

Jamie stared up at Mark with such trust that I had to look away.

‘I don’t know, but Mum and I will do what we can.’

Only the strongest effort of will stopped me crying at hearing Mark presenting us as a team.

I filled him in on the phone call, hearing the nerves jangling in my voice as I spoke. He nodded. I put a coffee down in front of him. The kids disappeared to clean their teeth. ‘Mark.’

‘Not now, Lydia.’ He pushed his mug away. ‘I’ll wait in the car.’

I
’d completely forgotten
that there was a fundraising committee powwow that morning. As Mark and I got out of the car with Jamie, Terri and Melanie were just heading into the ‘abomination of a meeting centre’ as Melanie liked to call it, owing to the fact that the only coffee available came out of a jar rather than a grinder. It was a measure of the speed of bad news that Melanie contented herself with a sucked-in ‘Under the circumstances, I thought I’d chair in your absence.’ For all I cared at that moment she could cover herself in golden syrup and roll butt-naked in a basket of raffle tickets.

Terri smiled sympathetically and boomed, ‘Bloody bad luck, Jamie. If Eleanor had stuck a picture of her fandango in a frame and hung it in the Tate on the end of a fairy wand, no one would have batted an eyelid.’

She’d always have a special place in my heart for that spectacularly un-PC comment.

On the other hand, Sonia, the headmaster’s secretary, would no longer be safe on the streets when I was out on a dark night. She was one of those women who smiled and acted all deferential but couldn’t quite stop her face quirking out a judgment. So although she was doing that whole soft-voiced ‘If you’d like to go through, Mr and Mrs Rushford, and you, Jamie,’ her eyebrows were up in her hairline delivering their ‘Well, I never’ message.

The headmaster leaned over his desk to shake hands. He indicated that we should sit. I felt as though I’d time-travelled backwards. I could picture the red and green of the swirly carpet in my headmaster’s office. The slight squeak of the chair as I fidgeted about. My mother, refusing to accept that I’d been to blame and hissing about ‘that delinquent Sean McAllister’ while the headmaster explained that he had no option but to expel me.

I reached out for Jamie’s hand. I didn’t care that he was sixteen and the headmaster, and Mark too, would probably think he was way too old to hold hands with his mum. He was not going to feel alone, ashamed or isolated as long as I was still sucking in air.

The headmaster waffled on about hormones, adolescence, the dangers of the internet – which if I was totally honest, was just a more monotone version of the sort of thing I said to Jamie every time I saw him on Facebook. I wanted to speed him up and shout, ‘Just get on with it!’ I liked my bad news delivered quickly, not strung out for maximum suffering for all.

‘However, we pride ourselves at Eastington House on not having knee-jerk reactions to incidents inside, or indeed, outside the school. Therefore, we’ve decided to talk to the whole of the fifth year about this topic but not to take any further action regarding Jamie. Or indeed Eleanor. So, Jamie, the best thing is that you get off to your lessons straight after this meeting.’

Jamie let go of my hand and wiped his palm on his trousers.

The headmaster couldn’t quite let us escape without some pompous little dig. ‘I would advise, however, as parents, that perhaps you monitor your children’s technology more closely. Although I do understand that it is difficult to police, especially when you both work.’

Relief mingled with the urge to say, ‘If you didn’t keep putting up your fees, I might be able to work a bit less and devote my whole bloody day to spying on my son.’

I tried to catch Mark’s eye for a complicit ‘what a twit’ smile, but the way he marched out into the corridor rather than standing back to let me through first reminded me that complicity might well be a thing of the past.

M
ark turned
on the car radio after a silence so thick, I opened the window just to breathe, to hear the noise of other people with normal, uncomplicated lives. A woman with a buggy stopped on the pavement as we drove past, pecked the man she’d been walking with on the lips and pushed on as he waved, smiled and headed off in a different direction. The ordinary moments that make up an ordinary life of togetherness.

I couldn’t work out what Mark was thinking. I didn’t know whether he was estimating how many suitcases and car journeys it would take to move out all of his stuff – or mine – or whether he was calculating how many strands of dishonesty we would have to unplait and brush out before there’d be any hope of recovery.

I tried to engage with him, to ask him what he thought about the meeting.

His eyes didn’t waver from the road. ‘I think he’s been lucky. Hopefully he’ll buck his ideas up a bit now.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘And now we’ve got through that, what about us?’ But I couldn’t. I shied away from asking a question I really did not want to know the answer to.

When we got home, Mark went straight upstairs. Part of me wanted to go up after him, force him to talk to me. The prospect of what I might hear filled me such sick-making dread that instead, I hovered downstairs, wiping the work surfaces, putting the milk away, tucking the cereal bag back into the box and listening, listening all the time for the telltale sound of the attic door squeaking open and the rumble of suitcase wheels. At every creak, a big chill engulfed me.

The doorbell rang. Just when I thought my day had reached rock bottom, my mother stood there, handbag in the crook of her elbow. ‘Are you ready?’

‘What for?’

She clicked her tongue. ‘To come with me to buy shoes for Tara’s wedding.’

‘Oh god. I’d forgotten all about that. I’ve had a bit of a morning.’ I stopped speaking before my voice crumbled away.

‘You really do need to organise yourself, Lydia. Where’s that diary I bought you for Christmas? If you wrote everything down, you’d keep on top of it all a bit better.’

I nodded, the quickest way to cut off the oxygen to that conversation.

‘Go and get ready then.’

‘This might not be a good day for looking for shoes. I’ve got quite a lot of things going on.’

I wasn’t sure what was worse, hanging around the house with this awful paralysing fright squeezing my vital organs until I felt as though my intestines might suddenly shoot out of my mouth, or holding myself together under my mother’s scrutiny.

‘You’ve always got a lot going on. You will insist on stretching yourself so thinly, taking on too much work. Now Mark’s kitchen business is doing better, you need to take a bit of a backseat and prioritise the family.’

I couldn’t seem to organise the words, ‘No. Sorry. Today is definitely not a day for debates about kitten heels and wide fittings,’ into a sentence. Instead, I finished putting the Weetabix back in the cupboard, surreptitiously scraping the crumbs off the worktop into the palm of my hand, conscious of my mother’s eyes sweeping round in a
How Clean Is Your House?
judgment.

‘I’ll get my bag.’

As I walked upstairs, Mark was coming down. ‘I’m just popping out with my mother.’ The words stuttered out of me, wholly inadequate. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it off with ‘She wants to buy a pair of shoes.’ I did, however, want to throw my arms around him and beg him not to pack his pants while I was away. Images of wire coat hangers jangling in an empty wardrobe flashed through my mind.

‘Nice to see you’ve got your priorities right.’

Little bits of my heart were scattering about all over the place.

‘What do you want me to do? Tell her the truth? Because if that is what you want, I’m on my way. Just tell me what I can do to make it better.’

He leaned towards me. ‘I want you never to have done what you did.’ He pushed past me, and I heard the front door slam.

It was hard to believe that three months ago, Sally Southport had been dead and buried and my mum was twittering with delight because I’d finally proved to her I was respectable, the pillar of society, chair of the fundraising committee. Now Sally Southport had screwed up again for a second time.

I could hear my mother moving things around on the work surface downstairs. God forbid a bottle of olive oil should loiter randomly in the middle rather standing to attention against the wall. Life couldn’t always be lined up. I grabbed my things and raced back downstairs. She bustled out to the car with me. ‘Mark was in a bit of hurry this morning. Barely said hello. Busy, is he?’

I grunted out a non-committal ‘Hmm.’ I’d spent my whole life managing her reactions, protecting my dad, never feeling that I had a right to be upset about anything myself. Today, I could only take responsibility for my own feelings. For once, everyone else would have to be accountable for their own happiness. Or misery, if necessary.

My mother adjusted the seat. She liked to sit completely upright as though her collar was caught on a coat peg. She’d probably combust if she ever caught sight of Jamie slouching so low over his computer, it was a wonder that he didn’t have QWERTY stamped on his forehead.

I concentrated on the traffic. I was having to think about how to get to the car park, a route I’d taken so many times before.

My mother kept tutting as I hesitated at the roundabouts, tapping her nails on the car window to indicate which turning I should take.

‘Are you going to buy some new shoes as well? A bit of heel would suit you.’

I ignored her. She didn’t require an answer anyway: it wasn’t a question, it was a criticism. While I negotiated the tiny spaces in the car park, she opened her purse and counted out the exact change for ticket machine. Enough for one hour. Good. She obviously wasn’t intending to have lunch with me. I couldn’t have eaten anything anyway. My stomach felt sour, as though I’d feasted on crab apples.

Once we were in the shoe shop, my mother kept picking up silly little pointy-heeled things and poking them at me. I managed a calm ‘I’m already sorted. You concentrate on finding a pair for the wedding.’

‘Darling, I think you’re letting Mark down by taking such a pragmatic approach to dressing. Every man likes a bit of femininity in his wife.’

I drifted off to look at the winter boots, acutely aware of the shop assistants giving me the once-over to see this great butch failure of a wife. Forty-three. Forty-bloody-three-years-old. Here I was, being talked down to by my mother while my husband was probably zipping up his holdall and working out what would be a fair amount to take out of the joint bank account. The boots blurred before my eyes, the domain of people who had headspace to think about what might stop them getting chilblains during a cold snap, people whose lives weren’t about to go skidding down the hill like an overturned jar of marbles.

But there was no escaping my mother on a mission. She jabbed a shoe with a ridiculous peep toe in my direction. ‘These. They’d go well with that suit you’re wearing to Tara’s wedding.’

She’d blame me for wearing them when I was sporting a bunion three months down the line. In a supreme attempt to keep the peace, I said, ‘Izzy would love them. I like something a bit sturdier.’

My mother, instead of receiving the peacekeeping gesture and whipping out her own white dove, produced a little hand grenade to liven up the proceedings. ‘I was just thinking the other day that she’s looked a bit tarty lately. All that eyeshadow and mascara. You need to keep an eye on that.’

My lethargy honed itself into something sharp enough to etch the finest diamond. I didn’t let her get as far as ‘We don’t want history repeating itself’.

‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.’ All the adrenaline that I’d been suppressing, the pent-up terror squeezing my stomach, the self-loathing jolting into my thoughts burst out from their hiding places and into the bright lights that had been designed to showcase the sparkly sandals, not illuminate the raw and bleeding beasts of family history. To the astonishment of the clientele weighing up the pros and cons of Hush Puppies, I snatched the shoe from my mother’s bony little hand and began prodding her with it. She looked like an affronted goose to start with, all swivelly-necked and pecky, until I really got going.

‘Don’t even think about criticising Izzy. She’s brilliant. As far as I’m concerned, she can speak back to me, be rude if she wants to, without wondering –
ever
– whether I would have been happier if she’d never been born. She won’t need to ask herself whether it’s okay to be her, just as she is. When she makes mistakes, I won’t talk about them for the next thirty years. I’ll open my arms, suck her in and tell her that sometimes we all fuck up and that I will always, always love her, whatever she does. Even if she screws the entire rugby A, B and C team at Eastington House and hangs her knickers from the flagpole.’

Swearing at my mother was as liberating as flinging off an underwired bra that’s been digging into your ribcage all day. I was aware of faces turning towards me and away from me as though I’d wandered in from under the railway bridge waving my can of Strongbow cider and shouting about how I used to be a famous ballet dancer.

My mum was goggle-eyed. She’d probably have looked less surprised if her vacuum cleaner had suddenly come to life and started attacking her. A tiny corner of my mind registered the little lines around her mouth, the eyeshadow creasing into her crêpey lids, the grey that had changed the texture of her hair. But the hard kernel in me had split open, the poisonous triffid inside bursting forth: selfish, entitled and oblivious.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw all the teenage shop assistants scattering to the stairs leading to the stock room. Their mothers would be grateful to me for the rest of their lives. They would never even reach the lower echelons of the ranks of ‘so embarrassing’ again. One of them shouted up the stairs, ‘Sheila! Sheila!’

I didn’t wait to see poor Sheila emerge, trying to grasp how a day cataloguing brogues and boat shoes had turned into this. With a brief glance around the shop to see if I actually knew anyone, I marched out, head held high, feeling my euphoria seep away before I reached the first corner.