Weeks in Naviras (16 page)

Now I’m alone to face the snow, which is pouring into the centre of the ski resort, slamming into the other buildings and causing them to break apart. Then it’s here, engulfing the balcony and sweeping me away. It doesn’t hurt, just as I knew it wouldn’t. I’m somersaulting around, unable to see anything except white. Sometimes I feel like I’m flying through the air, then just as quickly I’m surrounded by snow. Despite all the crashing and rending sounds around me I can still hear that sound, the electric pulsing alarm noise. It sounds urgent and angry, as though an intruder’s broken into a bank vault. It’s not going away, if anything it’s getting louder.

I never confronted James about catching him and Rosie in his office, which of course means I never dealt with it at all. I didn’t allow myself to conclude that James and I were incompatible as people, that we’d rushed into cohabitation, marriage and parenthood without really addressing who we were as people, what our needs were.

How could I put up with this, of course any rational person would ask? How could I go on looking at her, when I’d seen first-hand how she’d violated me. And indeed I had to look at her, for years afterward. At dinner parties and fundraisers, election meetings, conferences. I looked at her and saw everything I wasn’t. She would turn and smile. Maybe she caught me looking at her and wondered what I knew, but she was so privately disliked by so many people, even feared by a few. It’s likely she got those sorts of looks all the time and grew accustomed to them, revelled in them, maybe.

Of course I became vigilant, I’d regularly check James’s messages when he was in the shower. I memorised the password to his email, watching his fingers on the keyboard closely as he typed it in. I’d make myself late for work waiting for him to go into the bathroom, listening for the sound of the water jets being interrupted by his body before rifling through the messages on his phone. Before long I’d closed off every possible avenue of communication between him and Rosie, and it certainly didn’t seem they were having a protracted affair. I even casually asked James’s researcher in Parliament whether she’d been in the office lately, they said they hadn’t seen her at all.

I was so confused; if James had been having a long-running affair with Rosie, why had he agreed to me having a parliamentary pass? Would Rav have not sensed it and intervened? I had to conclude that James had only strayed into Rosie’s knickers because I’d profoundly lost my interest in sex during pregnancy. Not so much at first, but almost entirely by about four months in. It gave me pains in my stomach. I had a discussion with James about it, he’d initially tried to be more gentle. But by my second trimester the even the thought of sex almost had been nauseating.

I’d been aware of James’s frustrations about it, but even by that point there was so much that we weren’t addressing with each other. I’d also stopped talking to my friends about relationship problems and had become adept in making everything seem perfect, not even around other women but especially so. At some point I must’ve started believing my own lies. We became a couple proficient at deluding ourselves that our marriage was a happy one. Actually that’s not quite correct; James had everything he needed from me, except for the level of sex he craved. In every other aspect I was the perfect political wife, with the money to support him through his early career and the lack of confidence to challenge him or cause him headaches.

I should’ve told Gail about it, perhaps Lottie. Perhaps things might’ve been different had I not been seven months pregnant when I caught him and Rosie. As it was I felt I had few options until the baby was born, I felt I had a two-month buffer zone where James wouldn’t attempt to initiate sex with me. What horrified me more than anything was the thought of having him inside me, since I knew where he’d been.

It felt like being caugh
t in a game; a strange hybrid of musical statues and chairs, caught in the wrong place once the tune had stopped but still remaining perfectly still. A week or two after it happened I came to a decision; I’d give him one life, as it were. Any further transgression, even the hint of one, and I’d leave him. Such a sign never came.

It wasn’t long before we took the decision to sell the London flat and move to Eppingham full-time. I’d been resisting this for months but James had come under a bit of pressure from the local press, who’d accused him of being a part-timer for living in London. After seeing him with Rosie I changed my mind about moving, thinking it would mean any ongoing affair with Rosie would become obvious.
It was me who found the house, a new-build on the outskirts of Eppingham. The estate was new, most of the houses sold but as yet unoccupied. I’d researched it one Saturday afternoon while James was doing his MP surgery, the last unsold house on the estate. The following weekend when he was finished with constituency business we went over there. It was me who managed to push the price down, me who negotiated the sale of the London flat. It was me who said it’d be better to move before the baby was due, not afterwards. It was me who packed our belongings into boxes, even though I was thirty-two weeks gone.

Rav noticed my hurry when he came over to our old flat. James was at a lobbyist event in the West End and sent Rav over to make sure I wasn’t doing any heavy lifting. ‘Cracking on apace, aren’t you?’

‘I’m worried I might end up being early,’ I didn’t look at him, he could spot evasion a mile off. ‘If we don’t get moved before the baby comes then we’ll be stuck here.’

‘You’ll never be stuck, Ellie. I’d help you move, Rosie would chip in.’

I was pulling political memoirs out of the bookcase in the living room and into a large cardboard box. The postcard from Naviras must’ve been wedged between two of them because it dropped onto the floor.

‘Any more men on the go?’ I knew Rav had recently split up with his boyfriend who’d become fed up with never seeing him. He was quiet for a moment before shaking his head. ‘You know, Rav, you really should think about telling your parents. I think it would make it easier.’ I felt Rav was living in a glass closet; open to his immediate friends and those at Westminster, but not to his family or the wider party.

‘They’d be horrified, they’d disown me.’ It was something he’d said several times before, but not with the tremor in his voice. I looked up from my packing to find him rubbing his eyes. ‘James hasn’t told you, has he.’

I eased myself onto the sofa and put my arm around Rav as he described how he’d been going to a gym a lot, usually after work. That I already knew, but he explained he’d been using the sauna in the men’s locker room after his workouts, occasionally having a little bit of ‘fun’ in there when it was quiet. Far from uncommon, he said, and I believed him. Unfortunately one of these encounters had resulted in his playmate snapping a picture with their phone, which had been hidden under his towel.

‘I just thought it was some weirdo at first,’ Rav sniffed, looking down at the floor. ‘Then Jamie, sorry, James, said the photo had been sent to party headquarters.’

I was horrified, wondering out loud how the guy could’ve known Rav was a Tory.

‘I dunno, it’s not like it’s a gym at Westminster. I know it’s paranoid of me, but I think it might be an inside job,’ he looked up and across at me and I shrugged. ‘Anyway, the upshot of it is James arranged to have the guy paid off. James said he watched as the guy deleted the picture from his phone. But James says it’s impossible for me to stand for Parliament, now. That picture,’ he didn’t finish, started to cry silently, trembling. After a minute or so I asked him whether the incident had anything to do with his recent breakup, but Rav shook his head.

‘It happened after we broke up, and anyway that happened because I wasn’t making enough time for him,’ he wiped his eyes and sniffed. ‘Besides I don’t have time for boys at the moment, I think it’s time to get serious about work.’ He picked up one of the memoirs from the cardboard box in front of us and started to flip through it.

‘Not you as well,’ I said. It came out without me being able to check it.

‘Not me as well as whom?’

‘You know, it’s getting harder for James and I to spend any time together, that’s all.’

‘Everything’s okay between you two, though.’

‘Of course,’ it came out as an unexpected squeak. ‘But it’s not easy, and it’s never going to be, is it?’

Even then I was saying things to other people I didn’t believe, offering guidance I wasn’t myself following. I behaved like this because I was in crisis mode. Fight or flight? I used the latter to achieve the former. But as time passed I increasingly believed that James’s episode with Rosie had been an aberration. Once we moved he was often back home by nine in the evening, except on Mondays when the Commons always sat late. But even then as soon as voting finished he’d get into a taxi and come home. Sometimes there were late night crises and rebellions, but these things happened maybe five times a year, if that.

‘I don’t want it to take over my life,’ he claimed. ‘The next two years are about holding onto the seat.’

Bobbie came, and by virtue of geography James’s parents got to see a lot more of him than my father did. Once he’d retired his alcohol intake rocketed, with a bourbon for breakfast most mornings. Although it shames me to say it, I didn’t want him near Bobby. I knew that alcoholism ran in families and didn’t want my son exposed. Dad started having little accidents, he’d trip over in his flat and require stitches to his head, one afternoon he left the oven on while he was vegetating in the living room. The flat had been smoked out, the fire brigade had to kick the door in. All the while Dad’s smoke alarm had been beeping. Why hadn’t he done something?

Each time Dad had some personal crisis I had to go into London, normally taking Bobby with me. ‘Your father really needs close observation,’ one of the doctors in the casualty ward told me after one of several visits. ‘You should consider moving him into your house.’ James immediately vetoed the idea.

His own parents made such a fuss of Bobby. I never knew why they’d only had one child, obviously it wasn’t something I could ask them directly and James had never been clear about it either. They would come over four or five times a week, James’s father doing most of the decorating and gardening on the new house, his mother talking more at Bobby than to me. Even when she talked to me it was almost always to ask questions about Bobby or James. I was becoming some kind of suburban oracle, an internal communications manager for the Weeks franchise.

‘And I heard you managed to get to the Girl Guides Bake Day,’ James’s mother was holding Bobby, rocking him a little to vigorously for my liking.

‘I did, the last thing I need when I’m trying to shed the pregnancy flab.’

‘Oh, but they just love you, Eleanor. Everyone’s so pleased you’re spending more time here. It’s just marvellous.’

I think she assumed I was perfectly content to be the wife of an MP, and was surprised when I told her I fully expected to return to work at the end of the year. But she never tried to interfere with our marriage; whatever problems I had during that time the in-laws weren’t among them. They were just a contented couple in their late sixties, over the moon that their only child had returned home to be the local MP, bringing a convivial wife and beautiful baby in tow. What’s not to like, how could I begrudge them for feeling like that?

Fortunately neither of James’s parents had been with me on the cold blustery afternoon Liz Brickman walked up our driveway. She was still working for a newspaper – that is to say the newspaper was still being printed – and in many ways her job then was tougher than her later roles in TV. She was under much more pressure to find scoops on the paper, and probably paid a lot less for more stressful work. From the living room where I was feeding Bobby I watched her march to my front door and out of my sight before the bell rang, twice. I answered the door with Bobby in my arms.

‘
Mrs. Weeks, Liz Brickman, I’m a reporter with…’

‘Oh, I know who you are,’ I was friendly enough about it. ‘He’s not here, though.’

The wind whipped her hair and she tried to clamp it behind her ears. ‘I just wondered if I might get some comment from you about Morgan Cross, I gather you and James are close friends with her?’

‘What’s happened to her?’ I had almost completely zoned out of the rolling news cycle since Bobby’s arrival.

Liz was hard to read. ‘She’s been appointed US Secretary of State. It was announced by the White House at lunchtime.’ She looked a bit disappointed. ‘I thought you might have known already.’

‘James might have heard, but as you can see I’ve literally got my hands full at the moment.’

‘Of course, I understand. Congratulations, by the way.’ She was soaking wet from the rain.

‘Thanks,’ was all I said. James hadn’t needed warn months before that talking to journalists was out of bounds.

Liz pushed a button on her recording device. It beeped and she held it out in front of me. ‘So what’s your take on it?’

‘You need to call my husband, I’m afraid. I don’t talk to the press,’ I went to close the door.

‘Isn’t it true that your husband was in Washington recently, as a guest of Morgan Cross?’ She didn’t do anything so brash as put her foot in the door. ‘I heard that Rav Malik was also there.’

I don’t know why I didn’t just close the door on her. Maybe I was already experiencing cabin fever, desperate for company? Bobby had started screaming and it seemed callous to make her stand outside in the atrocious weather. ‘Come in, just for a bit,’ I said, letting the door open fully for her to step inside. ‘But turn that thing off,’ I added, looking at the recorder Liz still held in her hand.

She pushed a button on the machine and the little red light on it went dark. ‘Maybe we can talk off-record?’ She was smart enough to know to wipe her feet on the mat before I closed the door behind her.

‘Let’s see about that,’ I said, showing her to the living room. ‘How did you get out here?’ I hadn’t seen see any car parked in the road.

‘I got a taxi from the train station,’ she looked annoyed as she sat down. ‘He wouldn’t wait for me.’