Читать книгу The Man I Fell In Love With - Kate Field - Страница 6

Spotlights swept over the hotel ballroom, illuminating a magical party scene. Christmas decorations twinkled with glittery brilliance; ladies in their finest gowns mingled with men in gorgeous black tie, cheeks flushed by wine and conviviality; and by the side of the stage, in a space unexpectedly lifted from the shadows, my husband held hands with another man.

‘Who’s that with Leo?’ my friend Daisy whispered. Daisy had a figure friends would call petite, and enemies dumpy; she must have had a more limited view than I did. ‘I quite like that sexy bald look. He’s divine.’

But he wasn’t. He was real – horribly, unquestionably real. Those fingers entwined with Leo’s were made of skin and flesh, blood and bone, just like mine. And though their fingers dropped apart as the beam of light settled on the stage and pooled over the edges to where they stood, it was too late. I had seen. Most of the guests, expecting nothing more interesting than a display of luxury raffle prizes, would have seen. Friends, family, colleagues, and fellow school parents were all here tonight, attending this charity dinner at my instigation. Every corner of our lives cracked apart with this one swift blow.

‘Mary?’ Daisy said, as I became aware of a rustle of whispers, of curious gazes landing on me; humiliation scorched my skin. ‘What’s going on?’

I couldn’t reply. I looked at Leo, and Leo looked at me, the rest of the room forgotten. This man had been my best friend for twenty-five years, ever since the glorious summer day when the Black family had moved in next door. He had joined thirteen-year-old me as I sat on our front wall watching the removal men, desperately hoping that tucked away amongst the chairs, tables and white goods, they might produce a girl to end my lonely days. There had been no girl; but as Leo had consoled me by emptying a new tube of Fruit Pastilles to find my favourite green one, I had known there would be no more loneliness.

He had become my boyfriend when I was fifteen; my husband when I was twenty; the father of my children when I was twenty-one and twenty-three. So what was he now, when I was thirty-eight? I had a split second to decide, but it was enough. I read the terror, the anxiety and the appeal on his face, and there could only be one answer. He was what he had always been – my dearest friend – and that could never change, whoever’s hand he held.

I stepped forward on legs that felt like stiff pegs, and met Leo halfway. I drank in every detail of his face – white and frozen above the deep black of his dinner jacket, but still a face I knew better than my own – and then leaned past him and kissed the cheek of the stranger who had held Leo’s hand – the hand that had belonged to me, and my children, for so long. Exclusively, I had thought.

‘How marvellous to see you,’ I said, borrowing my mother-in-law’s favourite word, as if I could borrow her sangfroid too, and with it bury the overwhelming terror of being a public spectacle that I had inherited from my own mother. ‘You’re just in time for the raffle! Daisy, do you have any tickets left for …’ And here my brightness wobbled. Who was he? Leo and I shared everything, including our friends. How could he know someone well enough to link his flesh with theirs, without me even knowing their name?

‘Lovely to meet you,’ the man said. ‘I’m Clark.’ He held out a ten-pound note to Daisy. ‘I’ll take some tickets.’

‘Leo?’ Daisy asked. He glanced at me, blinking rapidly in his best dotty professor way, as if the complexities of buying raffle tickets were beyond him. I had seen that expression a thousand times; how could he be so familiar and so unfamiliar all at once?

‘Don’t we already have some, Mary? Did I see some pinned to the fridge?’

‘Yes, I bought some last week.’ They had been stuck on the fridge next to photos of our children, photos of us, and invitations to things we were supposed to be doing together. My heart wept at this casual reminder that though his hand may have so recently been linked with Clark’s, his whole life was linked with mine. ‘But you can get some more.’

He did, just in time: Daisy had barely crammed the corresponding tickets into the raffle drum when her boss, our local MP, took to the stage to start the draw. I won nothing, as usual, so I’d wasted my time daydreaming about the star prize: a two-night romantic spa break in a boutique hotel near Windermere. I screwed up my useless tickets, while on stage the MP continued his appeal for ‘green 246’. Then Leo called out, sounding baffled but delighted.

‘I’ve won. I’m green 246.’ He held his ticket aloft, and smiled his charming smile – the one that always looked as if it had been surprised out of him – at first Clark, then me, then the room at large. He went up to collect his hotel vouchers, but as he made his way back to where I stood beside Clark, a drunken whisper rose from the crowd of acquaintances around us.

‘A romantic break! Which of them do you think he’ll take?’

Leo froze, paralysed with shock. He wasn’t used to this; people weren’t nasty in Leo’s world – it was a gentle, courteous place. He looked at me – me first, this time – with a wordless appeal that he had no right to make but that I couldn’t refuse. I linked my arm with his, and we walked out, gathering our mothers on our way. My family was everything. It was us against the world, even when that world was no longer what I had always assumed it to be.

I paid the babysitter on automatic pilot, hardly knowing what I said as she peppered me with questions about the food, the venue, the company … That one made me pause. What did she know? Had news spread already?

As soon as she had gone, I dashed up the stairs and popped my head round Jonas’s door.

‘Hey, Mum.’ He spoke without taking his eyes off the TV screen, where a gruesome Xbox battle was underway. ‘Have fun?’

‘Yes, we did! We all had a great time!’

‘What, even Granny Irene? What did you do, drug her sherry?’

I kissed the top of his head, the thick black hair exactly like mine, and moved on to the next room to check on Ava. Her light was off, and in the sliver of brightness spilling in from the landing, she looked my innocent angel again as she slept, not the tempestuous teen who often took her place. I watched her sleeping for a minute, as I had done so many times before, but never with such a sore heart. What was she going to wake up to? What future would unfold when I returned downstairs? I was tempted to go to bed and avoid it – I had spent a lifetime ignoring difficult truths; it was my stock-in-trade – but Leo’s quiet ‘Mary?’ drifted up the stairs and pulled me back down.

I made two large gin and tonics, sloshing an extra measure of Tanqueray into my glass. Leo had switched on the lamps in the living room, framing us in a romantic glow entirely inappropriate for the discussion we were about to have.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked, sitting down opposite him so I had a clear view of his face.

‘I’m having a relationship with Clark,’ Leo said. There was no hesitation, no prevarication. He met my gaze unflinchingly as he spoke. ‘I met him two years ago, but it only developed in February.’

He said something else but I didn’t catch it, too busy ignoring the implications of ‘developed’ and scrolling back through the year, hunting for signs I’d missed. I couldn’t see any. We’d plodded on as normal: Easter with the family, summer in the house we always rented outside St Ives, school and university terms ending and beginning. Only Jonas’s GCSEs had broken the pattern this year – or so I’d thought.

And then Leo’s choice of word hit me. Relationship. Not sex, not affair, not fling. Leo valued words too highly for it to have been anything but a deliberate selection. A relationship was more than physical, and more than friendship: it was a deep, emotional connection. I scrolled back through the year again, this time looking for signs of my own deep connection with Leo, other than as colleagues, co-parents and housemates. I couldn’t see any. How had I been so blind?

‘Are you leaving?’ A tremor rippled through the words.

His voice said, ‘Mary …’ His face said, yes. ‘Not before Christmas,’ he added, granting a short reprieve – but until when? Boxing Day? New Year? Spring?

I took a long slug of gin while I tried to fathom out what I should say next. Perhaps it would have been easier if it had been another woman. I could have ranted; I could have demanded to know what she had that I didn’t. But the standard lines didn’t apply in this case. It wasn’t so much a rejection of me, but of my entire sex. That gave me no comfort.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why let me find out like this? And in public … You know how much I hate being gossiped about …’

‘Tonight was an accident. We’ve discussed what to do many times, but this was never part of the plan. I’m sorry, Mary. I didn’t know how to tell you. I couldn’t find the words.’

‘From a professor of English Literature, that’s quite some confession. You had centuries of words to choose from.’

Leo’s words stung, right through my skin and deep into my bones. At some point, in secret, they had discussed me, and how to break the news of their relationship. How could I not have known? Leo wasn’t made for deception; surely the guilt would have stained him somewhere, like nicotine marks on the fingers of a secret smoker? I studied him, but there was no change: the fluffy brown hair, the soft skin, the wise hazel eyes, the tortoiseshell glasses – he was just the same. He still looked like my Leo, and sounded like my Leo.

‘How could you do this? We had a deal. After Dad …’ I stopped. I hadn’t cried since I was eight years old; not since the day I had returned home from school and found that my adored daddy had gone, never to be heard of again. I wouldn’t start now. ‘You know how much loyalty means to me. On the first day we met, when we sat on the wall outside this house, I told you everything and you promised that you would never let me down. You promised again when you proposed.’ I took off my engagement ring and waved it at him, the diamond twinkling joyfully in the lamplight. ‘“I will follow thee to the last gasp with truth and loyalty.” You had it engraved on my ring.’

‘I know. I meant it.’ Leo took my hand. ‘I love you. That hasn’t changed. But with Clark …’ He looked up, and even before he spoke I saw the wonder, the excitement, the jubilation in his eyes, too bright and overwhelming for him to disguise. ‘The day is more luminous when he’s in it. Life is more exhilarating. I crave his company like an addict. We’ve never had that, Mary. If you’d ever felt what I have with Clark, you’d understand why I can’t give it up.’

It was an extraordinary speech for a man to make to his wife. Every word hurt. And they hurt most because I couldn’t deny them. Our marriage was good and strong, solid enough to have lasted to the end if there had been no Clark. But it hadn’t been based on exhilaration and cravings. My chest burned with a surge of jealousy: not that Leo felt this way about Clark rather than me, but that he had those feelings at all.

‘Fuck, Leo, what do we do now?’

He dropped my hand.

‘You don’t swear!’ he said, goggling at me – as if that one word had been the biggest surprise of the night.

‘And you don’t screw men. We’ve both learned something this evening.’

It was a cheap shot, and I regretted it when Leo’s face cracked with grief. This wasn’t an overblown TV drama, or a scandal to be sensationalised in the Daily Mail. It didn’t matter that Leo had fallen in love with a man rather than a woman. I wasn’t going to scream, or beg him to stay, or plot revenge. Real life was more complicated than that. I didn’t hate Leo. I hadn’t instantly stopped loving him. I wasn’t sure I ever would. But there was one thing I was sure of: I couldn’t let Jonas and Ava repeat my childhood. They would not lose Leo – even if that meant we all gained Clark.

After an awkward hesitation at the top of the stairs, we shared our bedroom as usual. I wasn’t ready to shut him out tonight; wasn’t ready to accept this new reality yet.

Leo’s phone buzzed with an incoming text while he was in the bathroom. I was already in bed, too twisted with anxiety to sleep. It buzzed again, and stamping down my conscience, I shuffled across the mattress and picked it up.

‘Just spoken to Mum. I can’t believe you’ve done this to Mary.’

It was from Ethan, Leo’s younger brother. Ethan had been away on a French exchange when the Black family moved in next door. Although he was more my age, by the time he returned, I was already a limpet on Leo’s rock and nothing could have prised us apart. He had lived in New York since the early days of our marriage, and rarely came back. If even he had heard the news from a different continent, how widely would my humiliation have spread at home?

I dropped the phone, slid over to my side of the bed, and longed for the day to be over.