The Day Of Second Chances (24 page)

‘But he might have been writing to tell you that he'd got a divorce. Or that his wife was dead.'

‘Neither of which was true, according to the letters we're reading now,' snapped Honor. ‘It was finished. We have to live with the choices we make, Lydia. Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.'

She stood and walked, in that shuffling way she had now, to the window. Lydia could tell when she was being dismissed. She stood too, and hesitated, looking at her grandmother's narrow back. Wondering if she should go to her and touch her shoulder. Hug her and say that she loved her anyway, even if she had kept that secret from Dad.

But Granny Honor wasn't acting as if she wanted forgiveness. And anyway, what good would Lydia's forgiveness do? Lydia had only been a little girl when all of this had happened.

She put the letter on the bed next to the others and went upstairs to her new room.

Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.

God, Granny Honor had lived a whole lifetime alone. She'd chosen to be by herself because she couldn't stand to hope. She'd cut herself off from the man she loved, and cut her son off, too, because she thought the pain would be less that way. Because she only wanted the man she loved if she could have him fully.

Was that what was going to happen to Lydia too?

She lay down on her bed. It was funny, but when her bedroom had been downstairs she'd been driven crazy by all the noise. But up here, she could hear nothing at all. It was almost as if she were totally alone.

HONOR HAS NEVER
been to Paul's house before. He invites her whenever he invites the rest of the department, for drinks or the end-of-term barbecue, but she always makes her excuses. Even before they were lovers, she hasn't wanted to see his house and the way he lives. But today is different. Today
she
is different.

Now, she stands on the doorstep, holding a bottle of wine. His house is a 1930s semi-detached in Headington, surrounded by similar houses. The stucco is painted white and the door is painted pillar-box red. It's not at all the kind of house she's imagined him in.

She hears voices through the door before it's opened by a blonde woman wearing a yellow trouser suit. She looks utterly ordinary.

His wife.

‘Hello,' she says, smiling. ‘You must be Honor. You're a bit early – no one else has arrived yet. You can help me put things on skewers, if you don't mind.'

‘That will be fine,' says Honor automatically. She steps into Paul's house, her lover's house. Wellies and plimsolls are piled up by the door. A collection of macs hangs from pegs.

‘Come through to the kitchen and I'll get you a drink. Oh, my name's Wendy, by the way.'

‘I know,' says Honor. ‘It's nice to meet you at last.'

She follows Wendy through carpeted rooms. There are bookshelves, wallpaper, chintz sofas, striped curtains. Flowers in vases, ashtrays on tables. A paperback novel lies open on a chair. A rag doll's feet protrude from underneath a sofa. A model of a Spitfire half-completed on a side table. The house smells of coffee and flowers and tobacco, a scent that Honor recognizes from Paul's clothes.

This could be anyone's house. Anyone's at all.

The kitchen is white and yellow, like Wendy. Children's drawings are Sellotaped to the cabinets. ‘I've started on the gin already,' Wendy admits, giving Honor a perfectly ordinary smile. ‘I need a cushion to get through these events. Everyone's so clever and there are so many politics, you feel you're on the verge of saying the wrong thing all the time. Can I pour you one?'

‘No, thank you,' says Honor. ‘Water will be fine.'

Wendy is petite, with a tidy figure and hair tied back into a ponytail. She wears hooped earrings. Wendy fills a glass from the tap and hands it to Honor, and Honor looks at the gold and diamond engagement ring that Wendy is wearing. The ring he chose. He gave it to her and asked him to marry him.

It is a perfectly ordinary ring.

‘I've heard so much about you from Paul,' says Wendy. ‘He says you're absolutely brilliant, one of the finest minds he's ever encountered. I've never heard such praise from him.'

Is there a meaning underneath what she's said? Honor searches Wendy's face, but can't find it. But then she doesn't know Wendy, for all her ordinariness. Wendy could mean anything.

‘It's very nice of him,' says Honor. ‘Paul is the brilliant one, of course. Is he in?'

‘He's nipped out with the children to pick up some more food for the barbecue. Well, he's taken two of them – the littlest is upstairs with a cold. They always seem to pick up a bug when you've got plans or you're entertaining, don't they? Do you have children?'

‘No,' says Honor.

That morning the doctor confirmed the test results. Ten weeks pregnant, nearly through the first trimester already. ‘At thirty-five, you're a bit old to be having a first baby, Miss Levinson,' he said, and Honor had not corrected the title. ‘You're what we call an elderly primogravidas. But you're healthy as a horse, so I shouldn't worry.'

From counting backwards, Honor has deduced that this baby was conceived in Paul's office one lunchtime, with the blinds drawn over the windows, Honor burying her face in Paul's neck to keep herself silent. When she opened the door to leave him afterwards, her hair pinned back up, her clothes straightened, there was a student waiting outside. She couldn't know how much, if anything, he had overheard. But nothing had been said, not yet. She has not heard anything, at least, and she can't tell if the glances she is receiving from other staff are significant, or not. She has always received glances. She will receive more, soon, when she begins to show.

‘But you've got a career,' says Wendy. ‘So that must be rewarding. How does it feel, though, to be in that men's club? They're all men, aren't they? Except for the secretary. I would go spare.'

‘I don't mind. I like men.'

Wendy finishes her gin and tonic and looks at it ruefully. ‘I'm going to be sozzled before anyone turns up at this rate. Would you mind putting some veg on these kebab skewers?'

Honor is trying to get a grip on a slippery cherry tomato when the front door opens and she hears feet running towards the kitchen. ‘Mum, can we have an ice cream now?' yells a tow-headed girl in shorts, crowding up to Wendy. A second equally blonde girl follows, holding a tub of ice cream.

‘Your father is such a pushover,' says Wendy. ‘Did he remember the sausages as well?'

‘Yeah, he—'

And then Paul is there, in the kitchen, wearing a shirt open at the collar, holding a plastic bag, saying ‘Do you doubt me'

He stops. He looks at Honor, and immediately away. Then back again, with his face prepared. He does not meet her eyes.

‘Oh, hello, Honor, I didn't know you were here already.' He kisses her briefly on her cheek and Honor feels his lips, smells the tobacco and coffee and flowers. Remembers the last time they were together alone, in a B&B near Chipping Norton. How they made instant coffee and talked about Heidegger, his hand resting on her naked breast. Two weeks ago. Honor had started to suspect then, but she hadn't had a test yet.

‘Has Wendy put you to work?' he asks.

‘Anyone who walks into this kitchen gets put to work.' Wendy takes the plastic bag and peers into it. ‘Oh Paul, you got the wrong sausages.'

‘There's such a thing as wrong sausages?'

‘Yes, nobody likes this kind. And I asked for two packets. Honestly, Paul, I'm nervous as a cat already, I don't need to be worrying about the sausages.'

‘I'll go back to the shop.'

‘No, people will be here in a minute.'

‘Mum, can I have an ice cream?'

Honor wipes her hands on a tea towel and says, ‘I will just find the loo if you don't mind.'

‘Upstairs, first door on the landing,' says Wendy, going to the refrigerator.

This house is full of things. Books, records, flowers, furniture, pictures. A relationship shored up with objects and history. Honor walks through the rooms and thinks,
Everything in this room has its story in their marriage, a private story not accessible to outsiders. Wendy gave Paul this; he chose this to please her; this was a wedding gift; their firstborn made this in school.

Honor and Paul have no setting together. They meet in hotels and in his office, and once – only once – in her flat. She can't picture them with a chintz sofa, a ceramic ashtray, a cot upstairs. A narrative behind things.

She touches a photograph, framed in silver, next to the Spitfire model. It's a posed photo, taken in this room from the looks of it: Wendy, Paul, the three girls, two blonde, the youngest with dark hair like Paul's. Wendy wears pink lipstick and a flowered frock. From the length of Paul's hair and the size of the children, it was taken a few years ago. Perhaps around the time that Honor met Paul. There's no trace of it in his face in the photograph, though: no sign that he's met a woman he desires. He's just smiling. An ordinary father. An ordinary house.

Honor is reflected in the glass. Her face is severe, with its prominent nose and chin, its high cheekbones. Her eyes are dark, her black hair pinned up at the back of her head. She has recently found threads of silver in it.

A sound comes from the corner of the room, and Honor starts. A third child is curled up on the sofa. The smallest girl, with the dark hair. She cuddles her doll and sucks her thumb.

‘Hello,' Honor says to her. After a pause, the girl removes her thumb from her mouth.

‘My mummy and daddy told me not to talk to strangers.'

‘A very good policy.'

Paul enters the room; she feels it as a shift in the temperature of the air. She is sensitive to his every movement, as she has been since the moment she first saw him.

‘I've got to go back to the shop,' he says, and catches Honor's wrist in his hand. ‘Listen,' he begins softly, and Honor tilts her head towards the child. He drops her arm.

‘Are you feeling any better, Alice?' he says to the child, going to her and sitting beside her. He puts his hand on her forehead, a gesture he has done a thousand times, and in that gesture Honor sees it all. All the minutes and hours and days and years that she has not been part of.

The tenderness that he would give their child in her womb, this same tenderness, would steal from this child on this sofa right now. It would steal from the ordinary house, the ordinary woman in the kitchen giving ice cream to her two girls.

She lays her hand on her stomach, still flat. She closes her eyes and apologizes to her future baby for stealing from him, too.

‘I'll go to the shop for you,' she tells Paul. ‘You stay here.'

She walks out of the door and she does not come back.

RICHARD DIDN'T RETURN
her calls asking if he could have the children that weekend. Lydia was out in the evenings – she didn't say where, just that it was something to do with school – and when Jo asked her if she and Avril could stay in one evening at theirs, Lydia just shook her head and turned up her music. Even after the children were asleep, Jo couldn't leave them in the house with Honor, because she couldn't get up the stairs if anything happened.

Saturday, Lydia had gone for a run despite the pouring rain, and who knew when she would be back. Her runs seemed to go on for hours, these days; it was a good release from exam pressure. Jo stood at the kitchen sink even though the washing-up was done, looking across the garden. Was he in? Could she slip out later, when Lydia was home?

‘If you want to go out,' said Honor, ‘I'm capable of looking after the children for an hour or two.'

She turned around, surprised. Honor was sitting at the kitchen table; she hadn't even noticed her coming in the room.

‘Oh, I couldn't.'

‘Of course you could. I've been in charge of children before, you know. I can't run after them, but we can do quiet things indoors.'

‘But Lydia says you don't—' Jo stopped. There was no need to remind Honor that she didn't like young children. ‘I don't have to go out.'

‘You never have a minute to yourself. Don't think I haven't noticed. And being a martyr doesn't make you Mother of the Year. In fact, I'm pretty sure that award has never been handed out to anyone, ever, no matter whether they sacrificed their career and social life for their children or not.'

‘I haven't sacrificed,' began Jo, but then why deny it? ‘I've never had a career anyway. Working in a café and then for an estate agent isn't exactly high-powered.'

‘Why don't you go out for a coffee, or to do some shopping? Meet up with a friend. Take advantage of live-in childcare. I'm not going to be here for ever.'

‘I didn't invite you here to be live-in childcare!'

‘But I'm right about the social life, aren't I?'

Jo didn't think that Honor had looked straight at her like this, since she'd moved in. ‘Yes,' she admitted. ‘I don't get to have much fun. But it's not a sacrifice. I don't mind.'

‘Of course you don't mind. Go out anyway. We'll be fine here. Have some fun.'

Jo regarded Honor carefully. She didn't suspect anything, did she? But Honor seemed unchanged, except for this offer. Her face was still stern, frowning slightly, as if she disapproved of Jo's life even as she was trying to help with it. Then again, if Honor suddenly started grinning, Jo would know that something was wrong.

It was ten in the morning. She didn't know what Marcus would be doing; he presumably had a social life of his own.

But she could try.

She brought all of Oscar and Iris's rainy-day toys downstairs to the living room. Jigsaws, board games, blocks, cuddly animals, cars. She put a changing mat and a supply of nappies and wipes on one end of the sofa, so that Honor wouldn't have to get down on the floor to change Iris. She prepared snacks in the kitchen, made sandwiches to put under cling film, enough for the two children and Honor too.