The Day Of Second Chances (23 page)

She had deleted her draft text, and then written it again over lunch. Then deleted it. She was not strong enough to delete Marcus' number. But she hadn't added it to her address book either.

She had read his text at least two dozen times.
What else do you want to do with me?

Nine words. They were all she could think about.

‘So last night,' Sara said to her, when she got back to the table with the coffees, ‘I put the kids to bed early, and I put on my special lingerie. The stuff I haven't worn since Polly was born? Actually, I think I was wearing it when Polly was conceived. That's how long it's been. And I went downstairs to where Bob was watching the football, just wearing that and this slinky dressing gown I found in the back of the wardrobe. And guess what happened?'

‘What?' said Jo automatically. She picked up a crayon, handed Oscar a napkin, took a sip of her coffee without tasting it.

‘I stood in front of Bob and slid the dressing gown off my shoulder, like in some cheesy film. And he actually tilted his head
to look around me.
He said could I wait a few minutes, the game was going into penalties!'

‘Oh.'

Sara looked outraged. Jo forced herself to remember what Sara had said.

‘Really?' she tried instead.

‘And the thing was, I wasn't even that disappointed. I was sort of relieved. I'd made the effort, you know? He couldn't blame me. I just went upstairs and had an early night.'

‘Sleep is the most important thing, sometimes,' Jo said.

‘Do you think that's how it is for everyone? It just peters out, after you've had kids?' Sara looked stricken. ‘Oh wait, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ask you that.'

‘You mean because of Richard starting up with Tatiana after Iris was born?'

‘It was tactless. Sorry.'

‘It's all right. It's crossed my mind. Iris wasn't a good feeder. I was tired all the time.'

‘Well, that wasn't your fault. It was no reason to turn to the au pair.'

‘I should have made more of an effort. He'd hired the au pair so we could spend more time together. That's what he said. But I put the children first.'

‘You're well shot of him. Can I have one of these?' Sara took a biscuit from the packet that Jo had opened, but not eaten, and dunked it in her coffee. ‘What about with your first husband, after Lydia was born?'

‘It was … we always made the time.' Although Lydia was not a good sleeper, and ended up in their bed five nights out of seven. He was working all hours, writing lecture notes, articles. Then there were the black hole days, when Stephen was in the house but not present, lost in his own world of pain.

But sometimes, there was an hour they could snatch on a weekend, when Lydia was napping. Sometimes they fell asleep, limbs entwined, and only woke up when their daughter crawled between them.

If she had known what was going to happen, how little time she had left with Stephen, she would have given up all of her sleep to be with him.

‘It was good,' she added, feeling the need to defend Stephen. But against what?

‘It must be easier with only one child.'

‘Stephen was wonderful,' she said. ‘There was never enough time, though. And then he was gone.'

Sara nodded. ‘OK, point taken,' she said, though Jo hadn't been trying to make a point. ‘I'll try again with Bob. Billy, can you not drive your cars through Oscar's cake, please? Anyway, speaking of which, have you seen the hot neighbour recently?'

Jo's face flushed. Sara leaned forward. ‘What?'

‘Oh, he …'
is sending me texts saying he is thinking about me, he wants to kiss me
‘… it turns out he is Lydia's teacher.'

‘No! What a disappointment.'

‘I know.' She took a hasty drink of her coffee and scalded her mouth. ‘Ow!'

Sara passed her a plastic beaker of water, smeared with child's fingerprints. ‘I thought he was at the very least a hot gardener.'

‘He's a Geography teacher. And also Lydia's tutor. I met him at her parents' evening.'

‘Damn! Still, at least it must have made parents' evening more interesting, to have some eye candy to look at. Did you introduce yourself as his incredibly single neighbour?'

‘We … mostly talked about Lydia.'

Why was she lying to Sara about this?

‘I have a great idea,' she said suddenly. ‘Let's go lingerie shopping after this. Splash out a little. Buy something that makes us feel pretty.'

Sara laughed. ‘With this lot? I don't feel like spending the next two hours untangling Billy from bras, thank you.'

‘Right. Yeah. Good point.'

Secretly, she touched her phone in her pocket.

That night, after the children were in bed, when Lydia was revising in her room and Honor was listening to music in hers, Jo stood at her kitchen window looking out. His light was on, as he'd promised. The outdoor light, and a light in the top window of his house, which might be his bedroom. She watched the strip of light between the curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Hoping to catch him looking out at her.

God, she was obsessed. It had been a little less than twenty-four hours, and she'd thought of nothing but Marcus, what he was doing, whether he was thinking of her. She had deceived her friend Sara. She had still not yet sent the text ending it. She knew, to the minute, how long ago he had been in this kitchen with her.

She made herself turn away from the window and finish making the cup of tea she'd started. It was going cold already. She brought it upstairs, along with her phone. She was alone now. She'd be able to think straight. She could delete his messages, send him something cool yet friendly, and get on with her life.

The master bedroom was much too big for one person, with a king-sized bed, walk-in wardrobes that gaped half-empty. The furniture was new and one side of the bed hardly used. Jo had tried sleeping in the middle, tried sprawling out, but she always ended up on the right-hand side. She was used to taking up little space. After Richard had left she'd bought some flowered scatter cushions, with the half-formed idea of making the room seem more feminine, more hers. They didn't do much.

Sometimes she stayed up later than she should, doing housework, so that she would not have to come up to this room alone.

Her phone beeped as soon as she sat on the bed.

Safe now. Are the kids in bed? Did you have a good day? Mxx

Her bedroom was above the kitchen. She went to the window, opened it. From this vantage point she could see the end of his bed. A blue duvet cover. Nothing else.

This has to stop
, she texted, and deleted.

I promised Lydia

I hardly know you

You're young enough to

She held the button down, watching the words disappearing letter by letter. Jo swallowed, and spelled out the truth instead.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about you either
, she wrote, and held her breath as she sent it off.

It didn't feel like a mistake. It felt … it felt the same way as she had felt in that café in Cambridge, when Stephen had put down his books and seen her for the first time.

No, not the same way. It couldn't be the same way. But she was breathless, heart pounding, stomach full of fire, feet hardly tethered to the floor. Alone in her bedroom with her children asleep in the house and she wanted to dance.

It was physical. The physical symptoms of desire. It was a temporary thing, a crush, just a part of what she had felt for Stephen, but it was more powerful than she remembered. Maybe you couldn't remember something this intense, this all-encompassing, once it was gone; not in all its details. Maybe once you'd had it, like she'd had it with Stephen, it left a hole inside you and most of the time you didn't even notice something was missing, until suddenly, one day, you found someone who filled it, and you knew that you couldn't bear to be without it again.

It was more powerful than almost anything, except the pull she felt towards her own children when she held them. And even that was different. Calmer, softer, wider. Not as hungry, not as greedy or focused.

Tell me what you were thinking
, texted Marcus.
Tell me what you want to do.

Fully clothed, she slipped underneath the bedclothes. She pulled them over her head, so she was hidden, surrounded, in a warm pocket of secret air. Not seen, not heard by any one, except for this invisible current from her phone, bounced up into space, bounced down to him. Travelling thousands of miles to travel a few metres. She licked her lips.

First, I'd unbutton your shirt
, she began.

‘
I DON'T WANT
to fall out over a boy,' said Avril, when she came by to pick up Lydia on her way to school. Lydia had been watching for her out of the window, pretending to listen to music on her headphones.

‘I don't want to either,' said Lydia.

‘Good. But you can't lie to me. You can't. It does my head in, thinking that you could be hiding something from me. We're supposed to be best friends.'

‘I wasn't ly—'

‘Just promise not to do it, OK? Promise to always tell me the truth.'

Lydia nodded. ‘I promise,' she lied.

‘
Sometimes I wonder if you receive these cards, since you haven't answered in so long. I suppose I can't blame you for keeping me at a distance. I'm a stranger, after all, married to a woman who's not your mother. I'm writing these cards for myself as much as for you – kidding myself that if I keep a channel of communication open, maybe one day you'll return it. You must have given me your address for a reason, mustn't you?
'

Lydia lowered the card. It was the third one she'd read; the other five sat, unopened, on Granny Honor's bed.

‘What does he mean, he's a stranger? Didn't Dad spend any time with him at all?'

‘To my knowledge, they only met once.'

‘But why? Didn't he want to know anything about his son?'

‘Until they met, Paul did not know he had a son. I never told him.'

Lydia stared at her grandmother. Her face was placid, as if she hadn't admitted something so unbelievable.

‘You never told him you were pregnant? I thought …'

Granny Honor raised her chin. ‘You thought I would place an obligation on a man who had no intention of leaving his family? I had far too much pride for that. And I had no desire to be second-best in Paul's life. That was a torture I chose not to endure.'

Lydia thought of the promise she had made to Avril this morning. ‘But you
lied
to Dad.'

‘I did not lie. I omitted. We never spoke of his father.'

‘But didn't he ever ask?'

‘When he asked, I told him that his father was not part of our lives.'

How did you criticize your own grandmother for what she'd done when your father was growing up? Lydia studied Granny Honor: the patrician nose, the stubborn chin, the steady brown eyes. She had always been a little bit scared of Granny Honor. She always felt stupid next to her. But this …

‘I …' She swallowed and thought about how to say it. ‘I would've been really sad not to know about my father growing up.'

‘You think it was a mistake. You think I did wrong, not to tell either of them.'

‘Well …'

‘Your father felt that way too.'

Honor said it softly, and she looked down at her lap as she said it.

‘It was a few months before he died that Stephen came to me,' she continued. ‘He told me that he had met a man, a fellow academic, at a dinner. The man had stared at him all evening. He had seemed troubled. After the dinner, he approached Stephen and asked him his mother's name.

‘He had worked out that Stephen was his,' Honor said. ‘You see, Stephen and Paul looked very similar. To Paul, it may have been like seeing his younger self at the table with him.'

‘What was it like for Dad?' Lydia asked.

‘Your father … was very angry. with me He and I argued. It was one of the only time …' Honor lifted her chin again. ‘I have thought of it often. Especially as Stephen died not long afterwards. I have come to think that I made a mistake. And there is nothing I can do to make it up to your father. He died with that between us.'

Granny Honor was in the armchair; Lydia was sitting on the bed, next to the unopened letters. Honor's posture was the same as it had been: proud, defiant, fierce. But something glittered in her eyes. It might be unshed tears. If they were sitting together on the sofa, Lydia might have reached out to her grandmother and hugged her. But there was a space between them. And something about Granny Honor's posture forbade her from crossing it.

‘Do you think Dad ever wrote back to him?' she asked.

‘I don't know. He may have, before he died.'

‘I hate to think of Paul writing, and writing, and not knowing that Dad is dead. Maybe we should write back to him,' Lydia said. ‘There's a return address on the back of the envelope.'

‘No,' said Honor quickly.

‘But he would probably want to know that Daddy is—'

‘What difference can it possibly make?'

Lydia frowned. She thought it would make quite a bit of difference, personally, but Granny Honor seemed so dead set against it, that she didn't pursue it.

‘Paul wrote to me, too,' said Granny Honor, softly again. ‘It was about the same time that Stephen and I argued. It must have been because he'd seen Stephen.'

‘Don't you know why? Didn't he say in the letter?'

‘I burned the letter as soon as I received it.'

Lydia couldn't imagine ever receiving something from Avril and burning it. She couldn't even leave a text unanswered for long. ‘Why?'

‘That chapter in my life was over.'