Separate Lives (15 page)

I needed that time, as it turned out, because Hal was . . . well, broadly fine, but considerably quieter than usual—“quiet” never being a word one could normally use to describe him. After he arrived home and dumped his rucksack in the hall, along with his jacket—the pegs in the lobby apparently remaining entirely invisible to anybody under, say, the age of twenty—he sloped down to the kitchen and raided the fridge and then the larder, making a pile of the kind of grazing foods I would normally ration more strictly (crisps, yogurt corners, fizzy drink, the token piece of fruit to fend off my criticism and which would mysteriously remain uneaten),
but I sensed this was a classic case of comfort-eating and if that was what it took to ease him back into our shared life as opposed to his dad's (mostly unshared) life, then so be it.

“So, good weekend?” I said brightly, albeit in a Don't Mention The War Until He Does kind of way.

“Yeah. S'OK. Um. Mum?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Why didn't you and Dad have more children?”

Woaah
. I hadn't seen this one coming.

“Um, well. Ah. I think we sort of didn't have time, really. We were so busy with you, and stuff, and then by the time we might have started thinking about it, well we sort of weren't really together so much.”

I was aware that I was speaking to Hal the way I might speak to an eight-year-old rather than a pubertal proto-teen who was almost certainly going to overtake me in height within months.

“My sister . . . Um, I have a sister—half-sister—on the way. You knew that?”

“Well yes, I did. But I also knew that Daddy wanted to tell you himself. And Nina, too, of course. So . . . is that exciting?”

“S'pose. Saw the picture. She looks like a prawn.”

“Yes, well, they do when they're only twelve weeks. You all look the same, really. I've got a picture—a scan—of you as a prawn. Do you want to see it?”

“Dunno. Maybe. Yes. OK.”

“Come upstairs. I keep all the baby stuff in my room.”

So we went upstairs and I dug around in the wardrobe to find another box of “Memory's.” This one wasn't an old shoebox but a rather lovely pale blue leather jewelry box from Smythson and inside it was all my Hal-related pregnancy and birth ephemera: the faded pregnancy tester that
confirmed he actually existed as a clutch of cells, all of the scans, our tags from hospital and one crispy dried-blood-colored rose from David's bouquet, which looked a bit umbilical. I handed Hal a scan.

“Look. Here you are as a prawn at twelve weeks, same as . . . Nina and Daddy's baby.”

Hal took the slightly crumpled paper and peered at it.

“This is black and white. Nina's baby is in color and kind of 3D.”

“Well, the technology's come on a bit since our day, like TV.”

Hal handed it back. “Yeah, we haven't even got HD Sky, Mum. Can we get that? Everybody's got it.”

“Yes, I expect we can. I'll call them tomorrow. So everything's OK? With Daddy and Nina and stuff?”

“Yeah, s'pose. But Nina does this really annoying thing. She keeps saying you're my ‘tummy-mummy' and she's my ‘other mummy.'”

“Does she? That's pretty nauseating. I'm your mum and she's Nina.”

“I know. Is it OK if I phone Dom?”

“Sure it is.”

And that was that. But that was also the moment I suddenly realized my nearly thirteen-year-old was starting to slip out of my grasp. The feeling that he was internalizing emotions I could no longer access was as overwhelming as the sense that asking him to articulate them was completely futile. My boy was moving into manhood, and with that he was also, inexorably and inevitably, starting to move away from me. I wanted to hold him very tight, right there, and I think he knew that. I also knew that he didn't want me to.

“OK. So . . . not too many snacks, Hal. I'm going to get us a Chinese later, if you fancy it?”

“Yeah, cool.”

But he was already halfway out of the door. He was going. Gone. I sighed a sigh so deep and long and pregnant with expectation that it reminded me of breathing during labor.

After our Chinese, after Hal had taken himself off to bed at the frankly unnervingly early hour of 8:45 p.m. without so much as a prod from me, I'd tried to interest myself in the kind of lush feel-good Sunday-night period TV drama I normally adore but, despite writing and acting that shouted “BAFTAs all round,” it just didn't hold my attention. After a desultory flick through the Sunday supplements, tearing out a photo of a pair of shoes—fuck-me slingbacks by any other name—from the
Sunday Times
Style section, which shouted “buy me,” I went downstairs and resorted to rearranging cereal packets so that you could see their spines. And then, at 10:47, a text:

Which didn't necessarily sound good. I was only slightly mollified by the second text-ping:

OK
I replied. Then a second text:
P x

And I decided I might want to watch that drama after all.

The call came just after ten the following morning. Alex sounded breathless, distracted.

“Pippa?”

“Hi. Yes, that's definitely me.”

“Look. Lot of things going on . . . I . . . look . . . I don't think we can see each other. At least, not for a while. And please
don't take this the wrong way—please don't. The weekend was amazing. You are fabulous . . .”

“But?”

“Well yes, there is a ‘but.' I wish there wasn't but there is. Susie . . . I've made a mistake. You've made a mistake. In fact we've both made a mistake.”

“Go on. Go on, Alex. Get it off your chest.”

“Look, I've had a conversation with Susie, about the conversation you overheard. Except it wasn't a conversation. It was a message. It was a message to me on the phone that got lost, so I never picked it up. It was a message trying to arrange a kind of date night,
between me and Susie
. She was leaving a message for
me
, Pippa. She's not having an affair. Or rather, she was trying to have an affair.
With me
. Trying to put some spark back into our relationship, y'know?”

That “y'know” was almost pleading. He desperately wanted me to understand, clearly needed me to let him off the hook. And yet even in that moment, with all this new information piling up through the ether, I could vividly recall overhearing Susie in the shop and I remained just as certain as I had at the time that she wasn't leaving a message. Or, to put it another way, even if she was leaving a message it wasn't a message for Alex.

“But—”

“No, Pippa, I can't hear your ‘but.' I know it's unfair but I just can't. I know what you think you heard, but I also know Susie. And deep down I trust her. We have a . . . bond. And that isn't to say you and I don't have a bond, but it isn't a ten-year-old bond. It's barely more than a ten day-old bond. And please don't imagine that I am not crazy about you, that . . . Oh God, Pippa. I've really fucked up. I need some space. At least for a bit. Do you understand?”

Yeah, of course I understood. But understanding didn't stop me wanting to punch a wall with my bare hands and howl a self-pityingly primal scream of “Why
meeeee
?” And yet I may just have had the best sex of my life with Alex, but I was also old enough to know that this didn't necessarily “mean” anything. It certainly didn't mean that this . . . thing . . . was going anywhere. So I just said, quietly: “It's very ironic, isn't it?”

“What is? What?”

“Well, you effectively started having an affair with me to . . . maybe, I guess, even up the score? Except it turns out there was no score to even up. But you only found that out after the event. It feels pretty ironic to me.”

“Please don't, Pippa. I don't even want to use the word ‘affair.' It's not
Brief Encounter
, it's the twenty-first sodding century. And I wanted to see you again because you are a beautiful, intelligent woman with whom I have a bond.”

“Just not a bond that's as strong as—”

“I have kids, Pippa. I have a family.”

“OK, so go, Alex. Thanks for your honesty, but you can go now.”

And I ended the call. The phone rang again straight away. Against my better judgment, I answered.

“Pippa, please try to see it from my perspective. Just give me . . . I dunno, some time?”

“I do see it from your perspective. And I am giving you some time. All the time you'll ever need. So go, Alex.”

And I ended the call again. And then, just to be on the safe side, I turned off the phone. And I seriously thought about punching a wall, but I kicked a cushion instead. And then I put the kettle on. And I stared at my sleeping phone. And then I had an idea.

The phone. Alex's lost phone. He'd told me that he'd called the hotel when he realized he'd lost it but that they hadn't found it so he'd just made an insurance claim and upgraded to an iPhone 3Gs. But I wondered how lost that phone really was. Wondered if there wasn't a chance—admittedly a long shot—that it had actually been found and that somehow its rediscovery had been overlooked in the chaos of Alex's last couple of weeks at work? The thought intrigued me. Not to mention the knowledge that long shots sometimes pay off.

Which is why, within an hour of my conversation with Alex, I found myself on the north side of the Marylebone Road, pacing the pavement just outside the Landmark Hotel, summoning up the courage to be a convincing liar in an act of folly which while not quite qualifying as stalking, came pretty close. And yet I felt compelled to do it. I felt it was the right thing to do. And I justified this because even if I never saw Alex again—though this didn't seem entirely likely, to be honest—I needed to satisfy my curiosity.

Inside the hotel, the concierge was Italian, super-smiley, with hyper-whitened teeth and a winning way with eye-contact that was just the right side of oleaginous—i.e., pretty much what you expect of a concierge.

“Ah yes, hi. My name is Caroline Smith and my boss, Alex Fox—I'm his PA—asked me to check if you'd had a phone handed in. He was at the Messerschmidt . . . no . . . the
Guthenberg
meeting a couple of weeks ago and lost his phone, and though I'm sure he's contacted you previously, I was, uh, just in the area and I thought it might be worth just checking with you again. Because you never know, do you?”

According to his badge the concierge's name was Giorgio Massimo, which sounded like a snigger-worthy pseudonym.
He eyed me levelly and then dazzled me with his teeth: 50 percent smile, 100 percent ring of confidence.

“Ah, Ms. Smeeth. The thing is, I call Mr. Fox's former PA, George—I remember 'im because I too am George—just today because yes the phone is 'ere, returned by a guest who only just discover he 'ad two iPhones in 'is bag. 'Owever, Mr. George is not returning my call. So.”

A shrug. And because that “So” was presented as a kind of challenge, some quick and creative thinking was called for.

“Well yes—Mr. George . . . George . . . is probably not picking up messages because he's on holiday. I am Mr. Fox's regular temp. So . . .”

This “So,” on the other hand, was as bright and breezily uncomplicated as somebody who has never had an acting lesson in her life could muster. Feminine wiles could potentially disarm even the most professional five-star concierge, so I simply smiled: “But of course I quite understand if you'd prefer to leave it for George to sort out on his return from holiday, in three weeks. Totally understand. Thank you very much for your help, Signor Massimo.” I leaned down to pick up my handbag and made as if to turn away.

“Miss Smeeth?”

“Yes?”

From underneath his concierge's pulpit, Giorgio produced an iPhone.

“I trust you will ensure this gets to Mr. Fox?”

“Oh I will. Thank you very much.”

I smiled. It was time for “Caroline Smith” to go.

For a while after the phone-heist I felt slightly dazed and a bit criminal. Indeed, I tried to weigh up just how criminal I may have been and the evidence was fairly compelling: posing as someone I wasn't, passing myself off in a job
I didn't have, taking somebody else's property under false pretenses . . . though in the grand scheme of criminality it did seem to be more at the
Hustle
end of the spectrum rather than, say, the Great Train Robbery. Nonetheless, there was no escaping the fact that I was both officially a liar and a thief, albeit (at least as I saw it) a thief for the greater good. Well mostly
my
greater good. So not Robin Hood, I grant you.

When my heart had stopped pounding and I had stopped pounding the pavements in syncopated time and settled in Starbucks on Baker Street with a grande skinny latte, I looked at the phone—which was of course uncharged and also, I presumed, blocked or locked, or whatever. Now I knew phones could be unblocked/locked, though I had no idea how it was done or where you went to do it, and I also suspected that this sort of thing fell vaguely into the realms of the weird new
Hustle
life that suddenly seemed to have replaced my previously un-criminal existence of thumb-twiddling Belsize Park-mummying. But I was on a roll. And I was enjoying it.

It turns out that it's not very hard to access somebody else's iPhone. You just go to an independent phone shop in one of the more “vibrant” areas of town and flutter your eyelashes a bit, go away, come back in an hour, hand over some cash and hey presto—as if by magic, Derren Brown's your uncle. And then you're ready for the school run.

It was a long, thumb-twiddling, Belsize Park-mummying afternoon and early evening before Hal absented himself upstairs and allowed me to investigate my—that is, Alex's—freshly recharged phone, which I did in bed, accessorized by a cup of peppermint tea instead of a pint of Dutch courage.