Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (5 page)

“
So, Steph, Mal, when are you two going to have kids?” Vince asked us.

We’d all settled down to dinner and had, for the most part, been enduring Vince’s brand of party entertainment—picking on people—with relative good humor, because he was the co-host (his wife Carole, who is lovely, had invited us), and this was what Vince did. He didn’t mean anything by it, he was just a moderately belligerent drunk. Even at his most obnoxious, he usually stayed away from this subject with us, though. Just like no one mentioned the war, no one mentioned our childlessness. From the way the room stilled after he spoke, the way a few heads dipped to stare at their plates while a few more tried to master a look of vague interest, I knew instantly they had all been talking about this before Mal and I arrived.

That was always the danger of turning up last at a gathering of friends, they talked about you. Discussed and dissected your life, relationship, looks, and decided they knew everything about everything. They knew where you were going wrong, what you could do to work it out, how you could fix the chasms in your life. They’d obviously discussed Mal and me and decided what was missing in our lives was a baby. Ten years of marriage meant nothing, as far as they were concerned, because we did not have a child.

They knew me better than they knew Mal, they knew how I loved to be around children, so they decided that our childlessness was Mal’s doing. And what they, as my friends, could do about it was to publicly shame Mal into doing the right thing: show him that they could all see my baby pain and he should ease it.

None of them knew the truth of it. Not even Mal. But I didn’t think about that. I couldn’t think about that. If I did, then … Mal didn’t know. Mal could never know. Neither could any of them.

My eyes darted to Carole—she was one of the head-dippers. She did that a lot where her husband was concerned: he opened his mouth, she cringed and dipped her head, wanting nothing more than for him to stem the stream of outrageous offensiveness that was no doubt flowing from his lips. Ruth was struggling and failing to look mildly interested as she looked at me, her lips curled together in a supportive smile. Opposite Ruth, Graeme, her husband, was sipping on his wine and openly watching Mal. Dyan was another head-dipper—even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew her cheeks were red with embarrassment. She hated this type of questioning that Vince subjected us to. She and Dan, her husband, had got together at college in our final year. Dan and Vince were best friends, so he was
backing Vince up by leaning forward and staring at me. Julian was another head-dipper, although his head was dipped probably because he listened more than he watched. He studied the intonation of people’s voices, the words they emphasized and those they flitted over. His girlfriend, Frankie, was smiling benignly at everyone. “Vacant” was the word we most used about her. We couldn’t understand why ultra-intelligent, slightly superior Julian had been with her for six years. Although, at that moment, I could see the spark of interest in her eye. She was twirling a long lock of her black hair around her finger, as usual, but she was definitely in the room, following what was going on. They must have been talking about this for a long time before our arrival to get even her to pay attention. And finally, Nicole and Jeremy—the fifth couple—both looking vaguely interested, were waiting eagerly to see what either of us would say.

I hadn’t been on the receiving end of a Vince interrogation for months. Mainly because I was usually the first to arrive at these things so no one had the chance to properly discuss me. Us. Unfortunately, hiding from those women in the toilets had taken away precious time. Also, Vince and I had a history that meant I knew more about him than most people at the table. If he got out of hand, I could stop him with a look. A reminder that I knew things about him that he didn’t want shared around. Things that not even Dan knew.

I lowered my eyes to my plate, stared at my dinner, wondering how to react. Too defensive and they would assume it was a subject to pursue. Too casual and they would think that I was faking it. I had to pitch my reply just right.

Raising my gaze to Vince, I shrugged a little, smiled a little more. “I don’t know. Maybe never,” I said, my voice skimming on the serious side of glib.

“But you’d be such a great mum,” Carole gushed. “I can’t imagine you not ever having kids, you’re wonderful with our two.”

The corners of my mouth edged up into a bigger smile, I couldn’t help it. It was such a compliment. “Thank you,” I cooed. “That’s such a lovely thing to say. They are wonderful kids, though.”

“They
adore
you. They’re always wanting to see their Aunty Steph. That’s why … Well, you’d be a great mum.”

“Thank you,” I said again, still glowing from the compliment. A second or two later, I felt rather than saw Mal’s body stiffen across the table. Everyone not privy to my thoughts probably assumed I was grinning about the idea of me being a great mother; they did not realize that I collected compliments like other people collected oxygen molecules to breathe. I craved external validation of my self-worth. It soothed a deep part of me like very little else could. However, to anyone outside of my mind, it must have seemed that I was desperate to have a baby, I was desperate to become a mother. And Mal … Mal obviously thought I was basking in this, that I was so caught up in the idea of parenthood that I’d forgotten what happened eight years ago.

I had to stop this. I had to change the conversation, otherwise it would become explosive. Mal’s explosion would be quiet, subdued, but destructive. He wouldn’t shout, he wouldn’t rant and rave, he would do something far worse: he would get up and leave.

He would not say anything to anyone, he would simply get up, go outside and wait in the car for me. He’d done it several times before, and I couldn’t bear it if he did it tonight. It made people think he was some sort of uncouth brute who couldn’t express himself. It made our friends think they had to worry about me and that maybe, just maybe, he might one day hurt
me. Physically. He never would. I knew that, but none of those at the table did.

“You haven’t answered the question, Stephie dear—when are we going to hear the patter of little Wacken feet?” Vince pressed. “How long are we going to have to wait?”

All eyes were on me by then; even the head-dippers were focused on me.

I’d known most of these people since we were eighteen or nineteen, but we were not close. The reason we had all got on for so many years was because our friendships were impressively shallow. We enjoyed our time together, but I wouldn’t call any of the people sitting around the table during a crisis. After the crisis had passed, to tell them what could be a then-funny anecdote, yes.
During
, when one of them had to take charge and offer comfort, never.

I opened my mouth to repeat that we’d maybe never have children, to put a firmness into the words that would shut Vince up and would tell the rest of them that they had to end this interrogation.

“You can hear the patter of tiny Wacken feet whenever you want,” Mal said for me. “I’ve already got a child.”

Everyone at the table drew back; a couple of people gasped quietly. Internally, I gasped, too. Out of everyone there, I was the most jolted: I
never
thought he’d say that.

“A son,” Mal continued, seemingly oblivious to the horror he had unleashed. Even Vince, cocky, mouthy Vince, was stunned to silence.

Carole found her voice first. “Was this from a previous relationship?” she asked, keeping her shock in check. She raised her hand, brushed a brown lock from her face as she looked to Mal for his answer. A tremulous silence settled as everyone
looked to him for an answer.
Lie
, I pleaded telepathically with him across the table.
Please lie. For me, lie.

“He’s coming up to eight,” Mal said. “He’s called Leo, in case you’re interested. He’s got black hair, brown eyes. He likes the green Teen League Fighter superhero the best and he plays
Star Wars
on the PlayStation all the time.” Was that pride in his voice? He was proud.
Proud.
He hadn’t told me these trivial details and we had agreed … Now, he was revealing unknown secrets to our friends. And he was
proud.

All eyes shifted back to me. Truly horrified as they were. My husband had cheated on me, had impregnated another woman while cheating and was so unabashed about it. Even vacant Frankie was agog: her eyes wide and incredulous, her mouth hanging open as her gaze swung between Mal and me, trying to work out who to stare at.

I gathered my senses together, inhaled and exhaled a few times before I attempted to speak. “It’s not as simple as Mal is making out.” I began the damage limitation process. “Someone very close to us desperately wanted a baby. It was heartbreaking. Mal loved her so much he’d do anything for her. And he agreed to father her child.” The absolute truth.

Mal stared at me across the table. His eyes were a piercing glare, slicing me open, cutting me apart, trying to expose the way I was lying without lying.

“Do you still see the child and mother?” Frankie asked. Frankie, who would previously have been smiling benignly and playing with her hair, was fully engaged and asking questions.

Mal’s glare intensified, I could feel it on my skin so I didn’t look at him. He was daring me to misdirect my way out of that question. He was accusing me, too. Accusing me because we both knew I was guilty. Of course I was.

“No,” I said. “She moved away before the baby was born. Went to live on the coast, rarely comes to London. We never see them.”

His chair made no sound as he pushed it back. He made no sound as he dropped his cream napkin on his half-eaten meal. Poor Carole had probably spent hours hand-making the pastry for the salmon en croute, scrubbing the new potatoes, baking the goat’s-cheese-and-chili-topped vegetables. And Mal had hardly touched it. Mal made no sound as he left the dining room. The only sound from his exit was the click of the front door as it shut behind him.

I stared down at my plate, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes, a lump bulging in my throat. I had hardly touched my food, either, and it all looked so beautiful. So delicious. And I could not even think of eating another crumb. In the candlelight and the shocked hush, everyone was watching me. Everyone was watching me and I was so ashamed. About now. About then.

I pushed out my chair, told Carole I would call her in the morning, told everyone it was good to see them, and left. And for the second time in less than six hours, I had to leave a room knowing that the second the door shut behind me, people would be talking about me.

Mal marches into the house without so much as a backward glance. After slamming the door, I run up the stairs straight to the bathroom. I clatter open the bathroom window, get a cigarette and then empty my bag on the tiled floor to find my lighter. I suck the life out of a cigarette, leaning out of the window to let the evidence escape. I draw the innards out of a second cigarette in four or five inhalations, too. After I am done, after I am
calmer, I wrap the ends in a wad of toilet roll and flush the telltale signs that I am a liar. It’s only a little lie, one of action, not words, and it’s necessary because now I can talk to him without shouting.

He isn’t in the living room, sprawled on the sofa, angrily flicking through TV stations, as I thought he might be. He isn’t in the dining room, rummaging through our CD collection, looking for something loud and thrashy he can play at full volume to rile the neighbors and hurt my ears. He is in the dark kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge door so he is illuminated by its light, chugging down a beer as though it is water.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I say to Mal.

The last of the pale gold liquid slides out of the clear glass bottle and down my husband’s throat. He slams the bottle back onto the shelf in the fridge, hard enough to crack the bottle or the shelf, and reaches for the next beer, twists off the top, flicks the top back into the fridge, puts the glass lip of the bottle to his mouth, starts to gulp. It’s him ignoring me. In the car, I thought I had been ignoring him right back, but now it is obvious that it’s definitely this way around.

“Don’t you dare ignore me, Mal Wacken. I’m not the one in the wrong here.”

He halts as he tips the bottle to his lips, lowers it and turns to me for the first time. His hooded eyes settle on me but are focused somewhere inside my head, as though he is trying to ransack my mind for information on what makes me tick.

“I did nothing wrong,” he states. “I simply told the truth.”

“We agreed—”

“We agreed I wouldn’t have any contact,” Mal cuts in. “That’s all we agreed. We didn’t say I wasn’t to talk about them. Him.”

He is right, of course. Just because we don’t talk about it,
about her, about him, about them, I have assumed that he wouldn’t talk about it at all. To anyone. Not to his mother (who he must have been getting all that information from), to his friends, to his work colleagues, to our friends. The world might know all about Mal’s son and I would be none the wiser. “But you didn’t have to do that,” I insist.

“Don’t you ever feel guilty, Steph?” he asks suddenly, the tone of his voice dropping to a low level that makes his words reverberate through me, like a low bass on a speaker moving sound through a body. “Don’t you walk around with a huge anvil of guilt sitting just there?” He presses his beer to the area over his heart. A million times he has silently and vocally asked me that, and every time the same thought flies through my mind: you have no idea how it feels to be me. To feel so guilty all the time that you aren’t sure where you begin and the guilt ends. “I never forced you to do anything,” I reply, deliberately avoiding the question. My guilt is not like an anvil, it is a small, determined, lethal parasite that has gnawed its way through my mind, my body, my heart, my spirit. My guilt has hollowed me out and left me dead inside.

“I know. It was my choice.” He clutches the bottle over his heart, a brand of his guilt as well as that anvil. “And I’d make the same choice again. I’d always make that choice.”