Seeing Other People (7 page)

‘Says the expert.’

‘Says your wife who shares a bed with you every night. You haven’t been sleeping right for weeks now. In fact I think the last time you had a decent night’s sleep was the night before that big shoot when you went out with Carl from work and didn’t make it home.’

‘I’m pretty sure it wasn’t then,’ I said quickly. ‘What is it with women and their ability to always know what happened when?’

‘It’s probably the same thing that causes you to remember whole scenes from
Star Wars
but not a single one of your friends’ birthdays. Do you want to know what I think the problem is?’

My breath momentarily caught in my throat. I’d never been a big believer in women’s intuition but when it came to Penny and her curious ability to discern the indiscernible nothing would surprise me.

‘Go on then, tell me.’

‘I think you’re working too hard and you need to get some rest. You’re not looking after yourself properly. Starting from today things are going to change. You’re going to start eating more healthily, going to bed at a decent time and you’re going to book a couple of days off work and stay home and do nothing. That’s an order.’

In that instant I was overwhelmed by the love I felt for Penny. She was so amazing, generous and resolutely on my side that she put me to shame without even trying. How could I ever have betrayed her? How could I have treated someone so badly who only ever wanted the best for me? I closed my eyes and turned over on my side; I just couldn’t look at her any more. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m going to try and get back to sleep.’

6

Regardless of Penny’s kindness or perhaps because of it, the dreams continued to the extent that there were some nights when I hardly slept at all. In the end however the answer to my problem came from a completely unexpected source: a conversation with one of the kids. It was a weeknight and I’d just arrived home from work to hear chaos reigning in the kitchen. Rosie was in floods of tears, Penny was nowhere to be seen and Jack was sitting alone on the stairs in his pyjamas.

‘What’s going on?’

Jack ran to me and jumped into my arms. ‘Mum’s just really told Rosie off and now Rosie’s crying and Mum’s got her angry face on and is sitting in the living room.’

‘Why? What’s Rosie done?’

Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said plaintively. ‘Mum sent me upstairs before the good stuff started.’

To be honest getting flung into the middle of a family row was the last thing I needed given how exhausted I was, but for Rosie to be so upset and Penny to have walked out of the room it had to be really bad and so I sent Jack back upstairs and opened the door to the living room to find Penny standing staring out of the window.

‘What’s up?’

Penny turned around. She’d been crying. She walked over to me and hugged me tightly. ‘I’m such a terrible mother.’

‘No you’re not. You’re the best mum there is. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘It’s Rosie. You know that vase your Auntie Pat gave us as a wedding present? Well Rosie broke it jumping off the sofa after I’d told her a million times not to. I was loading the dishwasher when I heard this almighty crash and I came in here to find it smashed into a thousand pieces. I asked her what had happened and she looked me in the eye and told me that she’d been walking past it and accidentally knocked it over. I told her to tell me the truth, and she insisted that she had and that’s when I completely lost it. You know how much I hate lying, Joe, I can’t abide it and to see her doing it so easily really hurts.’

‘Well maybe she didn’t do it?’

We both turned to look at the pieces of the vase; however we’d seen enough episodes of
CSI
to know that a vase knocked over by someone brushing past it doesn’t shatter into anywhere near as many pieces as a vase that’s been bounded into by a high-velocity child leaping from a sofa.

‘Right,’ I said to Penny firmly. ‘Let’s go and talk to her.’

I called Rosie down from her bedroom and sat her at the kitchen table. Aware that she was about to get what was coming to her she began sobbing even harder.

‘I’m going to ask you once and once only. What happened to the vase?’

‘I told Mum already, I walked past it and it must have caught on my clothes.’

‘So you weren’t jumping off the sofa?’

She shook her head.

‘Is that the truth?’

She nodded.

Penny drew a deep breath; she was moving in for the kill. ‘You know this isn’t going to be over until we get the truth, don’t you? You know families work on trust and if I find out in the future that you’re lying to me I won’t ever be able to trust you again?’

She nodded once more.

‘So I’m going to ask you one last time and then we’ll say no more about it: did you knock over the vase jumping off the sofa?’

Silence. Then a barely perceptible nod of the head. And then it all came out. She was sorry. She never meant to lie. She was just scared of getting in trouble and she promised never to do it again. And as I watched her sobbing in her mother’s arms I understood that when push had come to shove being in a state of truth with her mum had been more precious to Rosie than escaping punishment. Right there and then I knew what I too had to do if I was ever going to have any peace of mind even though the very idea made me feel physically sick: I was going to have to tell Penny the truth about Bella. It was the only way to make things right.

That night as we lay in bed, Penny deeply engrossed in some book club tome that her friends were forcing her to read and me watching her surreptitiously while pretending to doze, I tried to imagine myself asking her to put the book down for a moment because I had something important to tell her. I imagined the look of concern that would flash across her features and the way she would turn to me without a moment’s hesitation and say softly, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ and how I’d try several times to find the courage to say what needed to be said before finally managing to get the words out. But although I could imagine her immediate reaction – hurt, shock, and humiliation – I couldn’t begin to picture how things would ever get back to normal. Trying to see beyond that moment of revelation into our future together was like staring into a black hole. It just didn’t bear thinking about. The truth was while confession might have brought me some relief it would be the beginning of a nightmare for Penny and I couldn’t bring myself to do that to her. There was only one option for me: I’d have to keep it to myself. I’d have to live with the guilt. This would be my burden to shoulder, not Penny’s.

That night, having made up my mind to be the best husband I could be, I slept a peaceful, dreamless sleep, my first in a very long time. Things would be different from now on. What was done was done; I couldn’t undo it, but what I could do was change the man I’d be in the future. I made a vow to myself: I’d never betray Penny again and instead I’d dedicate the rest of my life to trying to become the kind of man of whom she could be proud.

My plan such as it was worked well over the course of the next few weeks, and those weeks turned into months until six months on I found myself at a Covent Garden hotel concluding a highly enjoyable interview with Johnny ‘Wolfman’ Morrison, the once-forgotten Delta bluesman whose career had been resurrected by the release of a new documentary. I thanked Niamh O’Connell, the PR who’d arranged the interview, like a professional and left the hotel room where it had taken place mentally conjuring up ways to structure the article.

It felt good to be back to my old self again. It felt good to spend a morning chatting with an attractive woman like Niamh and be completely indifferent to the experience. It felt good to have had an even prettier intern in the office than Bella for over a month now and to not know her name or anything about her; but more than that it felt good to be back firmly at Penny’s side, to feel that surge of love for her whenever I looked at her, to know in my heart, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was all I wanted.

So many things had happened since I’d made my decision not to tell Penny about Bella: Penny’s mum had had to have an operation on her knee; Rosie had been off school with a raging temperature for two days; the central heating had stopped working and we’d been quoted eight hundred pounds to fix it; Jack had sprained his wrist falling down some stairs at school; the car had failed its MOT and I’d been on a two-day trip to Stockholm to interview the creator and lead actress of a new Swedish crime series. It was the hectic nature of family life that made even the most recent of events feel like the dim and distant past to the extent that a day felt like a week and every week like a month. It was no wonder that time seemed as though it was on fast-forward. And while this may have given me the perfect excuse to forget the promise I’d made to myself to do right by Penny, I had steadfastly refused to let anything divert me from my mission. Nothing meant more to me than making her happy and the result of this was a renewed energy between us. Almost as if we were falling in love again – if such a thing was possible for two people who had never actually fallen out of love in the first place. For me at least, it was as though I was seeing her with fresh eyes: noticing all the things about her – her beauty, quick wit and kindness – which I had somehow become indifferent to over time. She was all I wanted, now and forever more.

I’d been back in my office for nearly an hour working on potential features ideas for the next issue of
The Weekend
when Penny rang.

‘Hey, you? What’s up? Everything OK?’

‘Everything’s fine. Are you busy?’

‘Just the usual, why?’

‘Because I want to take you for lunch,’ said Penny. ‘These past few weeks you’ve been so amazing – getting up early with the kids, buying me presents, volunteering to take Jack and his friends to the never-ending stream of Tumble Jungle/Wacky Warehouse/Bumper Barn parties that they seem to be invited to every week – and I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate you and everything you do for us.’

‘There’s no need,’ I replied. I meant it too. I didn’t want credit for these things, I didn’t want anything for them, I just wanted to get on and do what was right, but Penny wasn’t having any of it.

‘Of course there’s a need! Whenever I tell my friends what you’re like they think I’m making it up! Please let me do this one thing for you. It’s only lunch, nothing special. I just want to spend some time spoiling you for a change. Where would you like to go?’

I had no choice but to relent. ‘How about I see you in Allegro’s at one?’ I suggested.

‘That,’ replied Penny, ‘sounds ideal.’

Allegro’s was packed with regulars and I had to nod several ‘hellos’ to colleagues from other papers as Penny and I pushed our way past chairs and tables crammed far too close together to reach a free table in the middle of the café which had the benefit of the best view of the dessert cabinet in the house.

‘I really don’t understand why you all like this place so much,’ said Penny as she glanced over the laminated menu. ‘It’s just like a million other cafés in central London.’

‘I’ll have you know that Allegro’s is an institution in British print journalism,’ I declared. ‘The deals that have been made here over toasted sausage sandwiches and coffee are the stuff of legend. Without this place there would be no news, just page after page of white space interspersed with the occasional line about Jordan and the royal family.’

I called over a waitress and ordered the sausage sandwich and promised myself I’d go for a run that evening by way of compensation, while Penny opted for a grilled vegetable and hummus pitta.

Beaming like she was on a first date, she reached across the table and held my hand. ‘I can’t remember the last time we had lunch together on a weekday.’

Neither could I. ‘That’ll be never.’

Penny reacted with a good-natured tut and roll of the eyes. ‘You have a memory like a sieve! We used to have lunch together all the time when I worked at ICM. Remember, you used to beg me to meet you for lunch at that little sandwich place around the corner from Victoria station because you missed me so much?’

It rang a bell, but only faintly. It was a story from a different era, pre-kids, pre-mortgage and pre-marriage. It sounded about right though: I never had liked being away from Penny for too long.

I squeezed her hand and grinned. ‘What can I say? I was in love.’

Over lunch the main topics of conversation were entirely domestic – the kids, the house, the car. Penny was worried that Rosie hadn’t got enough clothes to last her for an upcoming week-long field trip to an activity centre in Sussex; I was concerned about the fact that Jack had wet the bed the night before last and hoped that it wasn’t going to become a regular thing again like it had the previous summer; and we were both worried about money, or rather the lack of it, and in particular how we were going to afford to have the boiler fixed once the novelty of boiling kettles to fill the bath every day wore off.

To an outside observer I was sure it must have seemed like the dullest conversation, the sort of practical exchange that as a young boy I had watched my own parents have a thousand times wondering how it was possible for two people to care so much about things that had nothing to do with
Star Wars
figures or Manchester United. I now knew that the things my parents talked about, the things Penny and I talked about, weren’t simply a list of moans and gripes but an opportunity to bond, because dull as they might seem to the outside world, they were important to us. These weren’t just my problems or Penny’s either, they were
ours,
problems that
we
solved together in our roles as joint chief executives of this particular branch of the Clarke family tree. And in a world where so many people had no choice but to solve the problems life threw at them on their own it was a comfort to know that whatever came our way, we would deal with them together, as a family.