The Third Wife (18 page)

‘I don’t know,’ he sighed. ‘I suppose they’re all … they’re just … they don’t know, do they? They don’t know how it all turns out.’ There was a note of desperation in his voice. Maya looked at him, concerned.

‘You know, they’re all wrapped up in private school cotton wool, they’re all bouncy and nurtured and they think it’s all going to be this golden bloody staircase to the stars. And they shout to be heard because they think the world is always going to want to listen. And then if you’re, you know, just a normal kid, if there’s no rich mummy or daddy, nobody to buy you a flat or get you a job, five minutes later you’re working in a clothes shop and five minutes after that you’re not even working in a clothes shop any more. And you’ve got nothing. Just a warped sense of entitlement and a posh accent. You’ve got no’ – he turned his gaze from the blobs of wax he’d dropped on to the table and towards Maya – ‘
integrity
.’

Maya didn’t say anything at first. She was slightly shell-shocked. She’d always known that it had been a matter of some controversy that Luke had had a private education when none of Adrian’s other children had. It was widely held to be a terrible mistake on Adrian’s part. How could he? Such an injustice. Maya knew that Cat in particular found it galling. And now here was Luke telling her that he hadn’t actually benefited from it in the least.

‘Don’t you think’, she began carefully, ‘that life is what you make it?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I do. I’m just saying that private school gives you a false sense of what real life might be like. If you don’t live in a castle. If your dad buggers off and spreads himself so thin financially that there’s no contingency. If you’re just, you know,
normal
.’ He shrugged. ‘Could I sound like more of a loser?’

Maya laughed. ‘Oh, Luke, you’re not a loser. You’re a …’ She put her hand out to touch his, but then retracted it, and the comment that was to accompany the gesture. ‘I just think that life is what you make it. Nobody owes you anything. That’s what I believe.’

‘So, what about you? What kind of school did you go to?’

‘Local comp,’ she said. ‘In Maidstone. Rough as shit.’

‘And now look at you. Teaching the fine young ladies of Highgate village.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Exactly my point.’

He smiled and eyed her affectionately. Maya felt her stomach roll gently. His gaze was unflinching and full of secret, fascinating thoughts.

‘What?’ she said, smiling, knowing as she said it that she was inviting an escalation in the intimacy of their rapport.

He had a small dimple to the left side of his mouth. It only appeared when his smile was on full power. It was there now as he turned himself round towards her and said, ‘Nothing. Just …’ He dropped his gaze. ‘Do you ever …?’

The teenagers in the next room were all talking at the same time. The noise was alarming, overbearing. Shrieks of laughter, competitive shouting.

‘What was it’, he said, shifting his body language, changing tack, ‘about my dad? When you met him? What was it?’

Maya exhaled. ‘Well, nothing at first, I guess. I mean, he was just the boss. I didn’t see him in that way at all.’ Her eyes misted over as she remembered. ‘I used to go home and tell my flatmate that he was the nicest boss I’d ever had. And as the days went by I suppose I just got to know him better and better and then one day I saw him walking into the office ahead of me and he was wearing this long grey overcoat and his hair was being blown about by the wind, and he stopped for just a moment, like this’ – she angled her face into the air – ‘and the wind was wild, buffeting him about and he just closed his eyes and he smiled. He stood like that for about ten seconds, just, you know,
loving
the wind. And my heart kind of went flop. I thought, if he can love the wind, what else does he love?’

She looked at Luke, expecting a derisive laugh, a mocking sneer, but he simply nodded.

‘And after that I started noticing other things about him. The way he spoke to people on the phone, always with respect, even cold callers. How he always held doors for people. Returned smiles. Left meetings to deal with his children in good grace. And believe me, I’d worked in a lot of offices before I worked with your dad, I’ve had a
lot
of bosses. That kind of stuff, it’s rare.’

He nodded again. ‘So you fell in love with him because he liked wind and holding doors open for people.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah. Basically.’

‘I like snow,’ he said. ‘I like carrying prams up stairs for stressed-out mums. Why don’t women like you go around falling in love with me?’

He was teasing. But still. There was something else there. ‘Women like me
do
fall in love with you. I believe there is one in Hove in that state as we sit here.’

‘She’s not like you.’

This was said abruptly. Almost sharply.

She blinked and stared at her fingers where they circled the stem of her wine glass. ‘She’s beautiful,’ Maya said quietly.

‘So what? How shallow do you think I am?’

‘She’s also really lovely.’

He sighed, as though she were totally missing the point. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘Yes. She’s lovely.’ It was a concession, that was obvious. Not what he really thought.

Two of the teenagers had left the next room and were sitting side by side in a cubby opposite. A boy and a girl, involved in a theatrically intense conversation. She was listening to him with wide eyes, stabbing the ice cubes in a glass of Coke with the end of her straw, then running her fingers through her thatch of uncombed hair. He said something deep into her ear and she laughed and as she laughed his arm came around her and pulled her into him, bringing her face straight against his mouth. There followed a prolonged and intense bout of French kissing, their chests pressed together, his hand pushed hard into the small of her back.

Luke and Maya watched, momentarily mesmerised; then they looked at each other.

‘
Get a room
,’ Luke muttered under his breath and they both laughed nervously.

The interruption was Maya’s cue to turn the conversation around on to neutral territory. But she couldn’t help herself. It was something to do with those teenagers. So raw and underdeveloped. And here was she, thirty-two years old. Married to an older man. A stepmother. Trying to get pregnant. Yet
that
, that ridiculous, messy, glorious, overblown time of her life when a week felt like a month and boys put their tongues in her mouth for barely any reason at all, when she was touched and squeezed and ogled and used, when she held men in places she didn’t want to hold them, wore clothes with holes in them and broke people’s hearts as easily as dropping glasses, felt suddenly as if it was only yesterday. Was it really all over? For ever? She experienced a sickening swell of nostalgia and turned to Luke, seeing him suddenly as a man of her own age rather than her decade-younger stepson. ‘Who’s your ideal woman, then?’ she said, pulling the wine bottle out of the bucket and topping up their glasses to mask her nerves. ‘If it’s not beautiful, lovely Charlotte?’

She watched a dozen thoughts come and go through Luke’s mind. His strange pale eyes flickered slightly. He picked up his wine glass and then put it down again.

‘You,’ he said. ‘Basically.’ He shrugged defensively.

She laughed, even though she’d almost expected him to say it. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m old enough to be your—’

‘Well, no, you’re not,’ he cut in as though he’d already thought the whole thing through. ‘Not even nearly.’

‘Well.’ Maya put a hand to her throat, which had grown suddenly red and itchy. ‘Old enough to be your stepmother.’

‘Yeah.’ He ground the base of his wine glass against the tabletop. ‘That’s for sure.’

The teenagers had separated and were now caressing each other’s hands and talking to each other in a seamless stream, their eyes locked together. It occurred to Maya that probably neither of them would even remember this night, this moment, this corner of the Flask that had once been the site of such fevered passion. They might not even remember each other’s names. They certainly wouldn’t remember the feel, the smell, the precise sensation of themselves, right here, right now. She felt another wave of sickness, felt again the need to catch hold of herself, to pin herself down into her own moment.

‘I think you’ll be an amazing husband to someone one day,’ she said. It was bullshit, but she needed to say something.

‘Yeah,’ he said sadly. ‘Yeah.’ Then he turned towards her, very fast, and said, ‘Do you think you’ll stay with him for ever?’

‘Adrian?’

‘Yes. Adrian. Of course.’

There was only one answer. ‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘I love him.’

He nodded. And suddenly his body language became fraught with something tender and desperate. Almost as though he was about to cry.

The boy across the way had his fingers threaded up through the underside of his girlfriend’s hair, his thumb rubbing against the skin at the back of her neck. She leaned into his touch and smiled and then blinked at him, slowly, cat-like. Maya held back a groan of longing and despair and almost unthinkingly, comfortingly, put a hand over Luke’s. His other hand immediately came down upon hers and then he caught her gaze with his, those eyes fixed on to hers, and Maya felt her heart pulse and burn with panic and watched his face come closer and closer to hers and she thought,
I want this. Please let me have it
. His lips came down upon hers and for one exquisite moment they were kissing each other and it was raw and teenage and damp and crazed and had nothing whatsoever to do with Adrian.

It lasted for all of six seconds, until Maya fought her way out of the moment and back into her real life.

‘Christ,’ she said, holding him back with a hand against his chest, where she could feel his heart banging hard. ‘No. Oh God. No, Luke!’

She turned it into his fault. She had to. She wanted to apologise but she couldn’t.

He pulled back from her, his fingertips over his lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He clutched the back of his neck and moved away from her. ‘I am so sorry. I don’t …’

‘It’s OK. Luke. It’s OK. Just don’t …’

‘No. Shit. It’s not OK. That was … I’m such a twat. Christ. I can’t believe …’

‘Luke. Stop it. It’s fine.’

‘Please.’ He gripped her hand. ‘Please don’t tell anyone. What I did. Please.’

She shook her head. ‘Of course …’

‘Don’t tell my dad.’

‘My God. No.’

He let his head fall down on to her hand, rubbed his forehead back and forwards against her skin. She looked down into the youthful thickness of his hair and softly rested her other hand against it. She wanted to rake her fingers through it, feel it part beneath her touch. She wanted him to lift up his head and kiss her again. But for now, they sat like this, him prostrated against her while she stroked his hair and stared sadly though the window at the misty, sodium-stained Highgate night.

Adrian let the curtain drop at the sound of Caroline’s footsteps up the front steps. He’d just watched Paul Wilson kissing his ex-wife in the front seat of his white minivan (it turned out that Paul Wilson was a purveyor of organic mushrooms and truffles, making him possibly the most Islington person in the borough of Islington. His van said ‘Shrooooom!’ in diminishing typeface on the back doors) for approximately ten minutes. As if the entire preceding weekend hadn’t given them both ample time for such things.

He heard the children upstairs stampeding to the door to greet their mother, and the dogs skidding about on the tiled floor in their desperation to see her face. As though she’d been gone for weeks, not since yesterday morning. Caroline appeared at the door of the sitting room a moment later holding a writhing dog and a wodge of mail, looking entirely like a woman who’d been having sex for thirty-six hours. Her lips were engorged and tender, her hair voluminous, her blue eyes burning bright as hot summer sky.
Are you ovulating by any chance?
he wanted to ask.

As Much Sperm as Possible.

That had always been her mantra when they were trying to conceive. None of this timing it to the precise moment of the egg floating away from its moorings. Just quick and often.

‘Hello,’ she said, dropping the dog and examining the letters in her hand. ‘Good weekend?’

‘Yes,’ he said brightly. ‘Really, really good weekend.’

She sat on the sofa and removed her sandals. Beau came in holding a certificate he’d been given that morning at a science show at the Business Design Centre. ‘I made a firework,’ he said, climbing on to Caroline’s lap and letting her look at his certificate. She peered at it over Beau’s shoulder, pointing and making the appropriate parental noises. Adrian watched from the armchair. He imagined her sitting there, bursting at the seams with Paul Wilson’s 38-year-old sperm.

Christ, he thought, is this what it was like when he and Maya had been trying to get pregnant? Is this what it felt like for the rest of them? He’d always assumed everyone would be delighted. A new brother! Or sister! A brilliant new addition to the large and wonderful family he’d brought into being. And everyone had seemed delighted. Cat in particular. At the time. But thinking of the venom in those emails from the mysterious poison penman or-woman, had the whole venture actually been shrouded in ill will and unhappiness? Had it upset Caroline? Susie? The little ones? He tried to remember what the others had said about it. But he couldn’t. Is it possible, he wondered now, that he hadn’t asked them? Hadn’t discussed it?

‘Miserable bloody weather,’ said Caroline, eyeing one of the letters cursorily and then sliding it back into its envelope. ‘Honestly, I can’t remember a more depressing July. Makes me want to emigrate.’

‘What’s emigrate?’ said Beau.

‘It means going to live in another country,’ said Adrian.

‘I don’t want to emigrate.’

Caroline smiled and squeezed him. ‘We’re not going to,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry. Did you watch the rowing?’ she asked, addressing Adrian.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no. Was it good?’ He didn’t care about the rowing. He imagined the rowing as having been a brief between-shag breather, watched in bed from under rumpled, sex-soaked sheets.