His Other Lover (21 page)

I think of her sad, small messages to him and I feel a little pang of guilt. I remember what it feels like to have a crush on someone so badly that you think you love them, an infatuation that you confuse with love but that isn’t really. After all, how can
it be when you don’t even really know them? Love isn’t having to call someone obsessively all the time; it’s being able to do mundane things like pick up their cups from by the sofa time after time, even though you’re bored with saying they won’t walk to the dishwasher on their own; it’s doing things like that and loving them
in spite
of it.

I glance at Pete, who is floating deeply in untroubled sleep. His brow is unfurrowed, his breathing deep and relaxed. He doesn’t look like a man who nearly lost his girlfriend tonight and is being stalked by a nutter.

The tiniest of doubts creeps into my mind. If he’s lying to me, if that was one very careful story he told me earlier, constructed for just such a moment, then he is a very, very devious man and I do not know him at all.

What if he
has
been having an affair, my plan has simply worked and he thinks she is actually crazy? Wouldn’t he just tell me something to cover his tracks, thus getting her out of the picture while still enabling him to hang on to his convenient life with me?

Oh, this is sending me mad, utterly, utterly mad.

I don’t know what to think any more, but I do know that somehow I’m going to have to intercept those balloons on Monday, because if he is telling the truth, when those turn up and he sees the message on them, he’s going to call the police. That I know for sure.

S
unday passes very, very slowly. All I can do is think about how I can stop those balloons before tomorrow. I’m a nervous wreck, biting my lip, running over the last two weeks in my mind. When he sees them, he’s going to go mental himself.

But for now, he is blissfully unaware. He is nothing but sweet to me, fussing around all day like a mother hen, as if I’m ill or something, saying what a relief it is to have everything out in the open at last, how he can finally relax, how he’s hated hiding this from me, how beautiful I looked at the wedding yesterday…Maybe we should start thinking about when
we
might like to, as he says, “formalize” things.

This of course should make me feel happier than I’ve ever been; he has as good as said we will get married. Strangely, however, I haven’t gone weak with delight, neither do I feel relief that my life is back on track and not thudding into the sidings. I’m getting what I wanted, but all I can do is move around the place like a ghost, thinking about
her.

Although Pete has changed his number, I am still watching,
waiting, through habit now, but his mobile does not ring all day. I am still unable to shake the doubt. Is he telling me the truth? Surely he is? Everything fitted, didn’t it? And why shouldn’t I believe my boyfriend of so many years over some actress?

When I get five minutes to myself, I call the balloon company to see if I can cancel my order, only to get a recorded message giving me the office opening hours Monday to Friday. I’m going to need to be here tomorrow to get to them before Pete does…great. So I call Spank Me to try and get the day off work tomorrow. He is unamused to be called on a Sunday at home, which is fair enough.

I tell him that although I know I’ve been off work for two weeks now and that they’ve been flat out, I’m still having problems and am not quite up to the commute, so could I work at home tomorrow instead? He is not a happy man. He tells me, in no uncertain terms, that if I am not sitting in the office tomorrow morning when he gets in at 9:30, he will expect to either see the absence of a limb when I do return, or at the very least a letter from my consultant confirming the hideous and terminal disease that I have.

After he has forced me to confirm that no one has died or is about to die, and that I am not involved in the extradition of a family member from a politically unstable country, he says that while no one could be more sympathetic than him, he is nonetheless trying to run a business—and a small one at that.

My final pathetic attempt is that I didn’t like to say before, but I have “women’s problems.” He says briskly that so does he—me—and can I please shut up, get off the phone and let him get back to his day off? Finally he concedes that he will, if I would like, give me an week of unpaid leave and get a temp in, to which I grumpily say no thank you. He
knows
I can’t afford a
week of unpaid leave. So I have no choice. I will not be home when the balloons arrive.

Monday morning sees me coming out of Old Street tube station and dialing a number on my mobile as I walk to the office. Still there is no answer—just a recorded voice saying the office is not open yet, would I like to leave a message? Yes I would—get into work and answer your bloody phones. It shouldn’t be this hard to stop a delivery of balloons.

I am, thanks to the trains, running a little late, and when I finally pant up the stairs and into the office, Spank Me is already ensconced behind his desk, brisk in pinstripe. Lottie’s eyes light up and she opens her mouth to welcome me back, but Spank Me gets in there first, acidly remarking how relieved he is to see I’ve survived my epic trek into work, and that Lottie will fill me in on my duties for this week. Oh dear.

Luckily he has back-to-back meetings all day and is on his way out again by 10:15, barking orders at us as he hurriedly collects his things, unaware of the finger I have stuck up at his retreating back.

Once the door slams behind him, Lottie pushes her chair away and says, “Oh my God—you’re back! I’ve been so worried about you, you poor ill thing—you’ve lost so much weight! Right, brew up, and when I get back from the loo I want to hear all about it. Get the biscuits too.”

But I’m already reaching for the phone. I’ve been waiting for an hour and a quarter now to make this call, getting more and more anxious. Dialing hurriedly, I wait for it to connect…but all I get is an engaged signal.

“Shit!” I explode. “Get off the fucking phone!”

I dial again frantically and wait…Still busy. Angrily I slam
the phone back down and stare at it. Give it a minute and I’ll try again. I have to get through—I can’t believe this is taking so long. “Come on, come on!” I mutter under my breath. Then I have an idea. I snatch the phone back up, dial again, hit ring-back and it’s accepted. Now all I have to do is wait.

I look up and see that Lottie has not moved, she’s just staring at me. “Okay,” she says slowly. “What the hell is going on?”

What feels like hours later, because I’m still waiting for the ring-back, Lottie is sitting in her chair, wide-eyed and open-mouthed with disbelief. Strangely, I don’t feel much better for having confessed everything, and I am too tired to even feel embarrassed.

“So now you pretty much have no idea if Pete’s telling you the truth or not?”

“That’s about the long and the short of it.” I manage half a smile.

“And you even called Katie, that’s how desperate you got?”

“Yup.”

“But she refused to say whether she’d been telling the truth about him and her…and basically told you to fuck off?”

I shrug and try to smile again. “Pretty much.”

“Oh, Mia.”

We both sit there in silence for a moment.

“Sucks really, doesn’t it?” I do a weird little laugh that sounds a bit like a bark. “And I’ve still got these bloody balloons to sort. They could be there by now. He won’t open them, but he’ll definitely be wondering what it is.”

“Shit,” Lottie says simply. “Shit.”

“Yes,” I agree tiredly. “That about sums it up.”

Then Lottie does something very unexpected. She gets up
and she walks around the side of my desk, reaches out her arms and hugs me.

Now Lottie and I are close—we’ve worked together for ages. We’re part of the fabric of each other’s day-to-day lives, but I wouldn’t call her a best friend. I haven’t met her mum, for example, or Jake for that matter. We don’t hang out with each other at weekends, we’ve never been on holiday together. We certainly don’t hug or kiss hello and good-bye. So to feel her arms round me is weird and a bit awkward.

“You poor thing,” she says quietly. “You poor, poor messed-up thing.”

And that does it. Her hug is so genuine, so kind and so unexpected that I burst into tears. Only they are not the tears that I
have
been crying, the frightened, hurt, heartbreaking tears—they’re deep, dam-busting, release-of-pent-up-stress, coming-from-the-pit-of-your-being tears. I think even Lottie is a bit surprised.

“I’m sorry!” I blub, scrabbling on my desk for something to blow my nose on. “It’s just been so shit…and now not knowing what to think…not talking to anyone about it…Oh. I’m sorry!” I dab at my eyes and look at her desperately. “I should be happy! I’ve got what I want, haven’t I? She’s as good as out of the picture. She certainly will be by tonight. Does it matter how? Surely the important thing is that she’s gone, and now we have a chance to really get everything sorted. I mean, he even said he thinks we should think about formalizing things after we went to that wedding.” I look at her eagerly. “That’s how sorted this almost is.”

“Formalize things?” Lottie frowns, moving back round to her desk and passing me a clean tissue. “I don’t understand.”

“He meant get married.”

She raises an eyebrow and sits down. “Oh, I see,” she says slowly. “How very romantic.”

When she says it like that, it sounds anything but. There is a pregnant pause while we both try and think of something positive to say, which is broken by the ring-back. Thank God.

I grab at the phone and at last hear a ringing tone. A youngish-sounding bloke answers with a cheery, “Hello, can I help you?” I am almost gibbering with relief when he tells me he can’t see it will be a problem at all to stop the delivery, and that he, Max, will personally sort it out for me.

“Oh, thank you so much,” I breathe, and Lottie smiles at me gently, getting the gist.

I hang up, sink back into my chair and close my eyes, totally silent.

“Well, thank goodness for that,” says Lottie. “Time for a cup of tea, I think.”

Later that afternoon, we are for once working. It’s been a very odd day. Lottie has been quiet and I have been so relieved and so tired, I haven’t felt much like talking.

I’m staring at my computer screen, frowning at the database and just wanting to go home, when Lottie suddenly says, “I don’t think I’ve ever really told you about my mate Leah, have I?”

I try to remember if she has or not, but it’s not ringing any bells.

Lottie pushes her chair back.

“She got married to this bloke she had a thing with in sixth form. They’d sort of stayed together through uni—on and off—although we all told her to dump him. Well, basically, they’d been married for about three years and surprise, surprise, it
started to go wrong. She knew it too, but couldn’t quite find the guts or will to tackle it, so didn’t do anything. She just waited for something to change, trying to put off the evil moment. And not just for her own sake either, to be fair—she desperately wanted to stop him being hurt and would have given anything for it to work out. I really think if she’d had a magic wand she would have waved it to mend the cracks.

“But do you know what she said to me afterward? That dead time, where nothing was happening—they weren’t going forward or back, or changing at all; waiting without seeing logically how it
could
change was what slowly killed her.”

She looks at me steadily and I look back at her, saying nothing.

“Finally, when she had gone beyond unhappy and was just wilting in a relationship that while wasn’t exactly hurting her, wasn’t letting her grow either, her husband took the reins. You see, she was so busy trying to protect him, she hadn’t noticed
he’d
been watching her. He had seen how unhappy she’d become and how suffocated she was.

“There can’t be many things more soul-destroying than knowing you’re not enough for the person you love, even though they want you to be, very badly indeed. So when he realized she didn’t love him as she should, and he couldn’t bear it, he left her. Just walked out on her one day.

“She totally fell apart when she realized he had gone. I think she’d known all along that their love, for lots of reasons, hadn’t quite become what they had both hoped it would be, and what that inevitably would mean, although she would have given anything for it to be otherwise, because she loved him.

“But even stumbling through the pain of missing him dreadfully, wondering where he was, what he was doing and who he
was doing it with…even all that wasn’t as bad as being still stuck in it; trying to make herself into something she wasn’t. That bit, she said, was like dying a little death every day.

“And do you know what? She’s totally okay now.” Lottie still stares at me, and still I say nothing. There is a long pause and then she clears her throat.

“I suppose what I’m trying to say is that she had a choice. Even though she didn’t realize it, she was making choices all the way through—it wasn’t just happening to her; she
chose
to let it happen.”

She stops, looks at me earnestly and waits. Waits for me to say something, but I don’t. I can’t.

“Would being on your own again really be so bad?” she says gently, and begins to scoot her chair round the desk, closer to me. “Wouldn’t it be better than this? You’d have all the promise of something really good and beautiful coming into your life again. And it would come into it; it really would. But it won’t all the time you’re…you’re
letting
yourself be stuck like this. You have so many people who love you and we’d—”

“Oh please don’t give me the ‘you don’t need a man’ speech,” I interrupt with a laugh that is clouded by tears gathering at the back of my throat and eyes. “I know I don’t. I know I could be okay if I wanted to be—without him. But I’m not like your friend, I really love Pete.”

“But you don’t even know if he’s telling you the truth about this girl! Okay—so it sounds like it all fits, but what if he’s lying? Are you really sure you want to choose—because you do have choices here, Mia, you’re not just stuck in this with no other way out. Are you sure you want to
choose
to be with a man you can’t trust? Can that really be love?”

“I think he’s telling me the truth.”

“But you can’t do! Why did you call Katie if you had no doubts at all?”

“Oh, I called her before he explained everything to me.” I reach for a tissue and blow my nose violently. “That was just stupid, I was in a state—I think I just wanted to talk to someone who really knew me, and yes, if I’m being honest, I suppose I wanted her to say that it had all been her fault—that he hadn’t tried it on with her all those years ago, that I had nothing to worry about now with this girl—but that was never going to happen. I mean, what the fuck was I
thinking,
phoning her?” I look at Lottie despairingly. “How stupid can you get? What positive outcome did I think could have come from it?”

Lottie shrugs and shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“What was I expecting her to say? ‘Oh, Mia, I’m so glad you called so I could confess my dark secret to you. Three and a half years ago, I came back into your life and having already stolen your childhood sweetheart, I decided to kiss the man you’d managed to subsequently meet and fall desperately in love with. I don’t know why and it was very wrong of me. I should have told you the truth but I wanted you to still be my friend, so I lied and said it was all his fault. But hey ho—you’re not my friend any more anyway, so I might as well come clean.’”