Relative Love (27 page)

‘Another coffee, madam?’

‘No … yes … A single espresso, please.’ It would make her late for Mrs Shorrold but she didn’t care. A thought had occurred to her and she needed time to analyse it. A desperate, terrifying thought. But, then, her situation
was
desperate. She had been patient and passive for too long. She needed to take control. Dan wanted to move things on as much as she did, but he was struggling and needed her help. All her life Cassie had made a point of getting what she wanted. And she wanted this man. More than she had ever wanted anything in all her thirty-seven years. She reached for her briefcase, set it on her lap and clicked open the locks. Inside, under swatches and receipts and notes, there was a pad of paper, and an envelope too, just one, as if it was meant to be. As if her idea had been sitting there all the time, waiting for her to stumble upon it.

Dear Sally Lambert
,

My name is Cassandra Harrison. I have been having an affair with your husband for almost a year. I love him and he loves me
.
I know that you no longer make each other happy. Please let him go. I am sorry you had to find out this way, but sometimes honesty is all that’s left
.

She thought long and hard about adding other things, like she knew Dan was a wonderful father and she would never get in the way of him seeing his children, how breaking up a family was the very last thing she had ever meant to do, but refrained for fear of sounding leeching and hollow. The letter, Cassie knew, was a bomb and no amount of kind or explanatory sentiments could soften it. Then she left for her appointment with Mrs Shorrold, tucking the envelope into the side of her bag because she didn’t have a stamp.

Helen had spent most of the drive back to London on her mobile phone. At work, some perfectly straightforward business for one of the companies she advised was going pear-shaped. Then her
mother had called to report that they were both bedridden with flu and to complain – as she did from time to time – that they never saw her or the children, which was true. In terms of visits Peter’s family took priority. They always had, and Helen had been perfectly aware that this would be the case when she married him. As she was not close to her own parents and they spent half of their lives dragging a caravan round Europe, this had never posed much of a problem to either side. But now that her parents were frail and travelling far less they were getting more demanding. Theo still hadn’t written a thank-you letter for his birthday present, her mother said, and if they weren’t going to see them at Easter could they at least arrange – now, that very minute – a visit sometime in the summer. Helen had cringed at the prospect of persuading Peter that the four of them should spend some of their precious free time in her parents’ higgledy-piggledy bungalow and said she needed to consult her diary which, in spite of being true, had sounded harsh. She would phone with some dates over the weekend, she had promised, when she had spoken to Peter and checked what other commitments were on the horizon. ‘I know you’re busy,’ her mother had replied, in a voice so whipped and clearly lacking in comprehension that Helen had prolonged the conversation with enquiries about flu and the weather in a bid to appease her.

Accelerating and decelerating between speed cameras, Helen had finally made it back to Barnes in an hour and three-quarters, just ten minutes before the arrival time of her first interviewee. She teased her key into the lock, then rested her forehead briefly against the door overwhelmed suddenly with tiredness. She had been up late the night before, trying to get ahead on paperwork before the long weekend, then set the alarm for six so as to manage the round trip to Ashley House with the children. Peter had said she was mad – creating work for herself – and should put their two on a train with their cousins. They had argued about it, as they seemed to argue about most things these days. Helen had tried to explain that Chloë still needed watching like a hawk, when the simple truth was that she wanted both children out of the way much earlier than the train plan would have allowed to get on with the interviews. In the past, attempts to involve the children at such an early stage of an au pair-selection procedure had always backfired, partly because they invariably opted for different candidates and partly because Chloë tended to form immediate and entrenched preferences on the basis of arresting, irrelevant details, like the colour of a skirt or a hairstyle. Helen’s rejection of a Dutch girl with a coiffure of pink stiff peaks in favour of Rika had caused a storm for weeks.

Helen picked up the post from the doormat and went into the kitchen, her heart sinking at the sight of the breakfast things still on the table. Theo had filled his bowl so full that a good portion of corn flakes had slopped over the sides, while Chloë had enjoyed a more than usually explosive encounter with the sugar bowl. White crystals were sprinkled not just across the table but on much of the floor too, as Helen discovered when she approached the mess with a cloth only to feel the disheartening crunch of granules underfoot. She had only just begun to clear it up when the bell rang. Cursing, she crunched her way into the hall and opened the door to a squat girl with ginger hair and a broad Scottish accent, with whom she could not imagine wanting to share her home or any aspect of family life. And so it continued for five long hours: girls of varying shapes and backgrounds, clutching fistfuls of sparkling references, proclaiming their commitment to childcare, their love of Barnes (and many other unlikely things) crossing the threshold and departing. Helen fired questions like an automaton, while inside far bigger ones burned in her mind. Why was she doing this? Why had she had children if only to farm them out to half-formed creatures who knew as much about motherhood as she did about karate? And why, above all, was she doing this when she had Kay? As she closed the door on the final and
most hopeless appointment of the day, this last thought would not be argued away. It was, Helen realised now, at the heart of her incapacity to be inspired by alternatives. Kay was perfect. She was patient, motherly, accommodating, cheerful and flexible beyond most working mothers’ wildest dreams. Chloë adored her and Toffee, and even Theo, for whom it mattered far less, had conceded that she was very funny and really good at cooking. (Helen had arrived home the other day to find the pair of them smacking their lips over some sort of fish pie.
Fish!
The very word was usually sufficient to make both children clutch their throats in a drama of retching.) Only Peter didn’t like Kay. He said it was the dog. And it was true on his first visit that Toffee had attempted to sample a few of the long silk tassels fringing the edge of the Indian carpet, but he had received such a roaring castigation from his mistress upon discovery that now he didn’t go near the sitting room without a look of anxious guilt on his foxy face.

No, it wasn’t the dog, Helen mused, snapping the kettle switch down and dropping a tea-bag into a mug, it was Kay herself. Unconventional, outspoken, faintly shambolic, but for some reason hugely comforting. Taking over from her in the evenings towards the end of term, seeing her bustle round the kitchen in one of her vast colourful outfits, a purple scarf round her hair, arms in the sink and one beady eye on Chloë, sucking her pencil over some homework problem at the kitchen table, the little dog curled on a chair next to her, Helen had felt that a new and much-needed warmth had entered the house. A warmth neither she nor Peter could provide. And when Kay said it was time to be going and Chloë had been ushered upstairs to a bath, Helen often found herself deferring the other woman’s departure with offers of tea or a glass of wine, which they drank at the kitchen table, chatting easily about the most improbable things. It turned out she was a freelance copy editor but could only work early in the mornings because, Kay claimed, by eleven o’clock the clever part of her brain shut up shop for the day. She had had an interesting and frequently traumatic life, the details of which she had no qualms about sharing with Helen, managing in the process to convey the impression of one who had learnt enough lessons never to be judgemental about the behaviour of others. As a result, Helen found herself confiding many things – partly out of the simple flattery of being confided in herself, and partly because she had never before met anyone with whom it felt so
safe
to share ideas. Peter, arriving tense and hungry from work during a couple of these sessions, had been embarrassingly unsecretive about his disapproval, virtually standing by the front door until Kay and Toffee had disappeared. She was a meddling neighbour with not enough to do, he said, and the sooner they got shot of her the better. She and Peter had never been so at odds over a person before and it worried Helen. Kay had picked up on Peter’s attitude at once and been breezily accepting of it. ‘I’m a woman’s woman and he knows it.’ She had laughed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like men – adore them, in fact, the darlings, wish I didn’t sometimes – but the more I go through life the more I think women are the real Trojans of the world, fighting on all fronts, evolving in ten different directions at once, workers, wives, mothers, not to mention menstruation, childbirth and the menopause, while men for the most part toddle along wanting to play at being little boys and be babied long into their dotage.’

When the doorbell rang again Helen groaned. It was already half past three and she had many things still to cram into this enforced luxury of a day alone at home. In stockinged feet and clutching her half-drunk tea, she tiptoed her way round what remained of the sugar spillage and peered through the spyhole. ‘You can tell me to go away – you really can. I was passing and thought I’d just pop in to see how it went.’

‘Kay.’ Helen swung open the door, beaming. ‘Awful, thank you, truly awful. They all look so
young
, or am I just getting old? I was least sure about the first one but now think she might be the best … and to be going to all this bother when you …’

Kay held up her hand, first to stop Helen on a subject for which she had received many rambling apologies already, and second to remove her baseball cap, revealing a livid orange-red helmet of her normally grey hair. ‘Don’t say a thing. I misread the instructions and left it on for twice the time you’re meant to. I think I could get to like it – one day.’ She thrust her head round the edge of the hall mirror, then glanced away quickly again with a hoot of laughter. ‘On the other hand, maybe not. As for you being old, I’ve never heard such bollocks.’

‘The kettle’s just boiled.’

‘Tea would be nice, but … how would you feel about going out to find it?’

‘Going out?’

‘Richmond, I thought. So many heavenly shops – and some good tea-houses, come to that. There’s one that does a particularly good ginger cheesecake.’

‘I couldn’t possibly, Kay, I’ve got – well, there’s sugar all over the kitchen floor to start with.’

‘I can deal with that while you change.’

‘Change? But – but I —’ Helen glanced down at her crisp white shirt and navy skirt, momentarily taken aback. ‘But I simply can’t, Kay, I’ve got so much to do – paperwork, laundry, packing for the weekend …’

‘When did you last go shopping – and I mean
serious
shopping?’

Helen, weakening, had asked what exactly she meant by that, only to be told – in a voice that would brook no contradiction – that it involved going in pursuit of entirely unnecessary things, like kitten-heeled shoes, eye-shadow and lacy knickers. When Helen said she was only comfortable in flat soles, seldom wore makeup and bought her underwear in packs of five from a catalogue, Kay had retorted that it was high time she mended her ways and shooed her upstairs. A few minutes later they were on their way to Richmond in Kay’s Fiat because, as she pointed out, it was smaller and easier to park. Helen had swapped the skirt for some black trousers, and covered the white shirt with a green jumper, and felt like a schoolgirl being taken on an unexpected treat, both because it had come out of the blue and because she had so readily agreed to it. Kay might have been a woman’s woman, but Helen certainly wasn’t. She had always despised females who shopped and lunched and discussed handbag styles. It was a matter of considerable personal pride that her career had been forged on the back of her brains rather than her looks. Colleagues who used their feminine wiles to promote themselves or their arguments had always seemed to her to be colluding in some huge scam in which she wished to play no part. Yet here she was, aged forty-seven, playing truant from a stack of pressing phone-calls and urgent domestic matters in order to purchase lingerie. And wanting to do it. That was what was so awful. ‘I’ve no idea why I let you talk me into this, I really haven’t,’ she murmured, looking out of the window. Kay had taken a route she would never have chosen, cutting through Roehampton and Richmond Park. The sun was low in the sky but very bright, illuminating the spring green of the trees and grass. A couple of deer, with speckled white spots on their gingery backs and antler sprigs sprouting next to their ears, looked up lazily as they passed, then sauntered across the road behind them towards a lay-by where several excited Japanese tourists were leaping out of a coach waving cameras. ‘And I’ve no idea why you are doing this either. Kay?’ She turned to look at her unlikely new friend, wondering suddenly how and why she had become so rapidly and deeply embroiled in her life.

Kay grinned. ‘The self-employed are always seeking distractions and I’m no exception. And …’ she hesitated ‘… I really do believe that in some curious way people appear as you need them, just as events take on patterns, that it’s all about one’s inner and outer lives being intimately connected for those prepared to recognise it. Synchronicity … or something.’

‘Really? So I met you because I needed you?’ Helen’s voice rang with scepticism.

Kay made a face. ‘Put like that it sounds stupid, doesn’t it? And, anyway, it works both ways, so I must have needed you too, mustn’t I? Which is certainly true in that copy-editing is a lonely business, and finding a new friend is always lovely, and Toffee adores Chloë … But to answer your question, no, you don’t
need
anything, Helen, least of all me. You’ve got it all – the perfect life. You’re just a little … sad at the moment. At least you were when you were putting the rubbish out that night all those weeks ago – and I happened to notice it.’