Lifesaver (40 page)

‘These last six months have been incredible for me,’ he continued, and again I wondered. ‘You’re so beautiful. We’re so compatible in so many ways—sexually, spiritually, practically. We fit together, don’t you think? And we’ve had some fantastic times.’

Wedding bells or the death knell of our relationship, I couldn’t let him continue. I had to tell him.

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘It’s not even the whole story, that I got to know you under false pretences. There’s more. Please listen.’

We sat down on a bench, not touching or looking at each other. My head was spinning but I forced myself to talk calmly.

‘Before I tell you the rest,’ I said, reaching out to touch his knee. ‘I want you to know that I’m only telling you because I want us to continue, not to split up. I know that you have obligations to Marilyn, but it didn’t work with her before and if it doesn’t again, I’ll...’

But what could I say: ‘I’ll be waiting?’ Waiting at home with Ken? Oh shit, I was going to have to come clean with Ken too. I was going to end up a lonely old woman, and it served me right.

Adam squeezed my fingers briefly, then withdrew his hand.

‘Do you remember the last time we walked down this towpath?’ I asked, half-smiling, half-wincing, putting off the evil moment to indulge in an extremely nice memory. It had been shortly after the beach episode, and I’d discovered that Adam had a bit of a thing about alfresco sex: one pitch black night, not far from where we were now sitting, he’d led me along the path until we came to a convenient willow tree. He’d pushed me up against its rough bark, lifted my skirt around my waist and, pulling down my knickers, slid first his fingers, then his tongue inside and around me, kneeling before me with his hands on my buttocks and his face pressed against me. I remembered the feel of his tongue, hot against my skin in the cool night air, and the thrilled dread of being caught out by the rapidly approaching flicker of a bike’s headlamp along the dark path, or the footsteps of two other lovers with the same idea.

‘How could I forget? said Adam. But he still wasn’t smiling. ‘So, tell me the rest, then.’

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, in my whole life.

‘Well...’ I stopped. ‘I can’t.’ I looked at him, beseechingly.

‘That bad?’

I nodded.

He sighed, and bile rose in my throat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, rushing round to the back of the bench and vomiting into the stinging nettles.

Adam followed me round and rubbed my back, and I was grateful for his touch. I accepted the scrunched-up tissue he offered me, wiped my mouth, and found a bendy stick of chewing gum in the pocket of my denim jacket which went some way towards taking the taste away.

‘This bloody bug,’ I said. ‘I know just how Max felt.’

‘Please tell me,’ said Adam. ‘I can’t stand it. Just tell me.’

I began again. ‘Well. What I said was true, about getting your letter and being desperate to meet Max, but too scared to let you know who I was.’ I grasped his arm. ‘I never set out to use you, or hurt you, Adam, I promise I didn’t. I certainly didn’t intend to seduce you or anything… I just fell for you. And yes, I admit that Max was a huge incentive to develop the relationship, but only because I loved him so much too. The thing is… I got carried away with being part of your family. I liked you both so much that I couldn’t bear to give you up. When I should have given you up.’

At last Adam looked at me. Two cyclists, in full Day-Glo skintight cycling gear, swept obliviously past us, the stinging nettles swishing in their wake.

‘Why should you have given me up?’

I fiddled with my wedding ring, twisting it round and round, watching with something approaching detachment as my tears dropped onto it. Then I saw the horrible realisation dawn on Adam.

‘
Please
don’t tell me you’re still married.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered through gritted teeth.

He leaned back on the bench, stretching out his legs and clapping a hand to his forehead. ‘Let me guess. When I thought you were working, you were with your husband.’

My shamed silence confirmed it.

Adam rubbed his beard. ‘So, how did you find the time to do any work, in between your husband and your lover?’

‘There was no work,’ I said in a very small voice. ‘The job doesn’t exist.’

Adam’s lip trembled and I thought he was going to cry. I did this, I thought. I’ve caused him this much pain, after everything else he’s already been through with Max and Marilyn. The thought of having to go and confess to Ken too made me want to die. I had to grip the sides of the bench to prevent myself standing up and walking off the edge of the path into the dark slow water of the canal, making sure I stayed under until it was too late and I didn’t have to feel like this any longer.

‘I love you,’ I said for the first time ever. ‘I really, really love you, Adam. It’s over between me and my husband. It’s been over for months. I was just too cowardly to tell him. It’s you that I want. Please believe me. I wouldn’t be telling you all this if I didn’t want to be with you properly. Honestly. I’ll go home tonight and tell him, I promise, if only you say we’ve got a chance…

‘Don’t bother,’ he replied in a hard, unfamiliar voice. ‘Save yourself a confession - spare the poor guy. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy - I’m sure your
husband
, whoever he is, doesn’t deserve it either.’

He jumped up, and grabbed hold of a tree branch, trying to snap it off, but the pliant willow was resilient, merely bending against the onslaught. In the end he tore the leaves off instead, throwing them on the path. It would have been comic, were it not for the expression on his face.

‘I can’t quite believe how spectacularly you’ve blown it, Anna,’ he said, almost conversationally.

‘Nor can I,’ I sobbed. ‘I’d give anything not to have done.’

A big brown and white dog galloped along the path, his owner, an elderly man, puffing along behind him. The man half-stopped, as if to engage us in some pleasantries, but hastily decided against it.

‘Please, Adam… I said.

‘Marilyn wants us to try and make a go of it,’ he said. ‘So perhaps this is all just as well. I didn’t want to break up with you, but now I see that you weren’t ever mine in the first place, I’ve got no reason not to.’

‘You won’t be happy with her,’ I ventured, still crying, and he rounded on me. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to me.

‘How
dare
you say that! After what you’ve just told me? Who are you to tell me what makes me happy—and who am I to know?’ His face crumpled. ‘I thought I’d found the person to make me happy. What a total, gullible idiot I am. All you are is a liar and a cheat, and I wish you didn’t exist. No, I don’t, because of Max. I just wish I’d never met you.’

He was right; I should never have said that about Marilyn. But it hurt, so much, to hear him say he wished he’d never met me.

‘It all makes sense now,’ he said softly, ripping up one of the willow leaves in his fingers. ‘You were so loving, and brilliant with Max, and I think we had real passion for each other—but whenever I tried to talk about the future, you just switched off, or changed the subject…t first I thought you were just cautious, afraid of being hurt; but then I did start to think that this relationship was more one-sided than I’d originally believed. I started to think that you didn’t love me.’

But I do, I wanted to say. I wanted to scare the ducks off the river by shouting it out; I wanted to rattle the windows of Max’s classroom with it. I wanted Max to know that his dad had changed my life, made me happy, made me love myself, helped me look to the future again. But it was too late, and Adam wouldn’t have believed me any more. I couldn’t blame him.

Instead I looked away, to a row of tall but unidentifiable trees wavering on the horizon. It was depressing how nobody except the older generation seemed to be able to readily identify trees or birds anymore, other than the most obvious ones, I thought. Max and Crystal knew who Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears were, but wouldn’t have had a clue about the difference between an oak and a sycamore, or between a wren and a sparrow…/span>
Lil
could have recognised a mistlethrush in an elm tree at a hundred paces.

It was easier to think about Lil and trees, than to think about Adam holding Marilyn instead of me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, wiping the tears off my face with the palms of my hands. ‘I didn’t mean it. I really hope you are happy with Marilyn…

‘Thank you. I think we will be. She’s changed, anyway. She’s stopped drinking, she’s doing an Open University degree. She said that she was coming back, even before I rang her mum when we thought Max was ill. She really wants to make a go of it with me. For Max. She can’t do enough for him. And he’s so happy to have her back…

‘Of course,’ I said, equally politely, feeling steel shutters clanging down all around me, sealing me into a prison of my own making. ‘I will still be able to see Max though, won’t I?’ My throat seized up with fear that Adam wouldn’t let me.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Please.’

He hesitated. ‘Well, I suppose so, for Max’s sake. After what Marilyn did, it would be pretty harsh for you to suddenly disappear out of his life too. But it may have to be when I’m not around.’

I felt suddenly desperate to hug Adam, to hold on to him. I was already missing the contours of his solid, reassuring body. I’d loved that body so much—he was right when he said that we fitted together well.

‘I’d like to say goodbye to him before I leave, if that’s OK.’

‘Before you go back to your husband, you mean?’

I bit my lip. ‘I’m only going back to tell him it’s over between us.’

I meant it, too. I couldn’t continue with Ken in the knowledge that I’d felt so much for another man.

‘You can pick Max up from school today if you want.’ Adam extracted a hard lump of tissue from the front pocket of his jeans, and managed to un-crumple it enough to blow his nose into. He looked old and miserable, the red rims around his eyes making them seem even bluer than ever. Then he put his arms around me - but politely, like a formality.

I nodded into his shoulder. ‘Thanks,’ I said, wondering how I’d be able to cope knowing that it might be the last time I’d ever see Max burst out of the classroom door, laden down with artwork, lunchbox, swimming stuff, book bag; yet still dancing across the big yellow snake painted onto the tarmac of the playground, hopscotching across its’ numbered segments towards me, with his stuff flapping about him, his very existence a miracle.

I’d always visualized collecting Holly from school like that, waiting for her in a huddle with the other parents in the playground. It had been such a joy to have Max running into my arms, walking him home to play, sometimes with a friend, giving him juice and biscuits and then cooking supper for him, sweet-talking him out of waffles and into broccoli. The small rituals of premeal pees and hand-washes, rations of children’s TV and liberal applications of glitter glue. I’d felt just like a real parent.

I was going to miss it all so much. And I was going to miss the man with his arms still around me, the scratch of his beard rubbing against the crown of my head as we stood still, the canal flowing faster past us than we would ever be able to flow. I closed my eyes and thought of Ken. Maybe I should at least try and make things work with him now: to get re-accustomed to brown eyes instead of blue, tennis instead of Tweenies, the lonely nights in instead of the cheerful chaos of the supper-bath-bed routine. I was so afraid of being on my own. Perhaps, I thought, I could bend the truth a little, just to save his feelings? Perhaps I could make out that Adam and I were just friends, and I’d only rented the flat to be close to Max? But the thought of telling yet more lies felt like the scratchy fibres of a rope noose tightening around my neck. I
had
to start telling the truth, no matter what the cost.

Adam dropped his arms back to his sides, and moved away from me, looking at his watch.

‘We’d better go. I’ll ring Marilyn and tell her not to pick up Max today; that you’ll bring him home. And then you’re leaving, right?’

It sounded like an order. I’d lost him, and Max.

Normally, when I picked Max up from school, I stood in a cluster with the waiting mums, many of them with smaller children straining to escape from pushchair harnesses or snoozing in papooses against their still-distended bellies. It had been the first time since Holly died that I hadn’t resented other mothers in general; but since I’d almost, by proxy, become one of them, I had learned to pity them instead. Not so much by their complaints of sleepless nights and non-existent sex lives, but by the tangible marks of their suffering: the violet shadows under eyes they’d had no time to make up; the misshapen but comfortable clothes; the tangled hair; the defeated expressions when their toddlers took not a blind bit of notice of what they said. We’d chatted in a desultory fashion, about the weather, nits, colds, E numbers, cake sales. I loved every minute of it.

On that last day, however, I stood apart from them. It would have been nice to continue the charade one final time, but I was too afraid of breaking down. Unfairly, I imagined their censure: ‘Look at Max’s dad’s girlfriend - Max isn’t even hers, and she can’t take the pace…he should try having three!’ Although of course they must have realized that Marilyn was back on the scene, so perhaps they pitied me instead. They were probably thinking, well, my ass might be halfway down the backs of my legs, but at least I’ve got a husband and a child of my own.

I put on my shades, even though the sun was behind a thick bank of grey-blue cloud, and fixed my eyes on the room Max would come out of at three o’clock. There was a blu-tacked sign on the classroom’s outside door announcing that the letter of the week was C, and that they would be talking about Carpets, Corn and Ceilings. Not in the same sentence, I hoped for Max’s sake.

He was the sixth one through the door. As I mentally named the classmates in front of him, I wondered how they would all turn out, and felt sad that I might never see them again. Dominic was out first - face of an angel, blond cherubic curls and cupid’s bow lips—but a mouth like a sewer and far too handy with his fists. Then came Natalie, who was a sweetheart. She’d been round to play with Max a few times, and he bashfully referred to her as his girlfriend, and surreptitiously stroked her brown pigtails when he thought nobody was looking. Although she’d been the one who’d told him that boys put their willies into girls’ dinkies to make babies, so perhaps she wasn’t as innocent as she seemed either. She was followed, in a huddle, by Katy, Gracie, and Amy, the ‘y’ girls. They were far too cool to hang around with the likes of Max.