Chapter 18
18
JUNE 2018, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND
Under the shroud of her large, brown plastic sunglasses awkwardly perching on the bridge of her nose, Kate looks up and down the quiet platform like a really incompetent spy. With a niggling pain that makes her regret not going to the loo before she left the house, she hops up through the open doors and onto the train before they slam together behind her.
Kate looks left and right, to both sides of the half-full carriage, and turns left to sit where there seems to be fewer people.
Face forwards , Kate thinks as she slumps into a double seat, her hips chafing against the flipped-down table as she goes. She flips it back up as she lands in a plump puff of dust.
If anyone I know walks up the train they’ll only see the back of my head.
She looks at her mobile. It is 9.51a.m., the train is leaving exactly on time, and Kate, desperate that no one should see her doing something perfectly normal for a woman who might be shopping the summer sales, or meeting a friend for lunch, or going to a gallery while her kids are at school, feels her heart race as they pull out of the station. She leans against the window on a train she used to travel on daily but which now feels like an alien craft.
None of my family know where I am.
Kate removes her navy summer jacket and puts it over her small floral handbag on the seat next to her in the hope that no one else will want to sit there. So she can be on her own. So she can compose herself. So she can work out her strategy. This is only the second off-peak service of the day, winding through her rural idyll before bursting into the noise and chaos of London, and the carriage is only half-peppered with People In Less Of A Hurry. A retired couple, wearing gilets and cords, look relaxed as they head to the Wallace Collection. A smart, heavily made-up woman, who Kate assumes must be going to an interview, checks her reflection in a small compact mirror. Three women, not much younger than Kate, talk about how guilty they felt dropping their toddlers at nursery while they toted cool bags full of Prosecco, strawberries and cream. A man in a suit listens to a podcast. Perhaps he had a dentist appointment and is going in late.
The train before must have been much busier , Kate thinks, blowing a sigh of relief.
She removes her sunglasses and places them carelessly on the jacket next to her as she smooths down her fringe. She smiles wryly, and Kate feels a little bit bad knowing she would tell Chloe off for being so careless with her own sunglasses. Although Chloe’s probably cost more than these make-do shades Kate got in the Next sale three summers ago.
She repositions herself in the seat and tugs on the seam of her black bootcut trousers. They feel uncomfortable between her thighs. She feels uncomfortable. Kate hasn’t felt like such a fish out of water in a long time, but she has been waiting patiently for this opportunity, ever since she found a long blonde hair entwined in the fibres of George’s stripy scarf.
That hair . It’s consumed her. At first, Kate went back to scour George’s diary, to look at the repeating patterns. ‘Lunch B’ came up several times since she first noticed it in March. Then Kate started to use the Find My iPhone app on her mobile – usually reserved for timing dinner, seeing where George is on the train line, so she knows when to put the chicken pie in the oven, so she doesn’t overcook the veg. But since Kate found that hair, she’s used her phone to track George more and more: to see whether he really was going to badminton (he was, although he did sometimes go to the Red Hart with the gang afterwards), or whether he took a detour when he popped to Waitrose (he didn’t). But mainly to see where he was heading on the days it said ‘Lunch B’. Sometimes it was Spitalfields Market, sometimes it was Galvin La Chapelle. Last Wednesday it was to The Shard, but Kate couldn’t work out if he was back eating octopus at Hutong with ‘B’ – and clients, or whoever – or whether he was in a suite at the Shangri-La. Either way, he was there for over two hours and the infuriating little green dot couldn’t specify which floor he was on.
Last Friday evening, when Kate was trying to work out when to put the pasta on and looked on her phone to see where his train was between Liverpool Street and Claresham, she noticed he was offline. Even after he came through the door, had watched Newsnight and gone to bed, his phone, sitting defiantly awake on the bedside table next to him, showed that he was offline. Had he disabled Find My iPhone so Kate couldn’t find him? There wasn’t a little green dot pulsating by their bed, and it agonised Kate as George lay with his back facing her. Even the brown moles on his pale skin started to look like green dots taunting her .
On Sunday morning, while Jack was playing cricket and George was standing on the rough chatting to Nigel Pickover, Kate sat on the soft grass at the edge of Claresham village green, sunglasses on, and slipped George’s phone out from the inside pocket of his light blue linen jacket. She put the jacket over her knees and pretended to shiver on the fresh midsummer morning. Beneath it, she secretly tapped George’s passcode into his phone so she could reinstall the app. 240576. His date of birth. It didn’t work. His passcode had always been his date of birth ever since he got that phone. Kate tried hers. That didn’t work either.
Of course it wouldn’t be mine.
She tried each of their children’s birth dates, then panicked that the phone might be disabled if she made one more attempt. It was at that moment, as Kate slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of George’s jacket, as Jack shouted at his mum to bring over his gloves, that she realised she had no choice. Next time ‘Lunch B’ came up in the diary, she would go into London. She would sit in the sandwich shop – if it’s still there – opposite the London HQ of Digby Global Investors, on a stool at a wooden bench attached to the glass window, and wait for George to come out. She would follow him. She would find out who B was, because she doesn’t think it’s Baz Brocklebank from the Sydney office any more – Kate looks at his dull Twitter feed every now and then, full of musings on margin deadlines and trade deals and pensions, but he’s mostly ‘Down Under’ when these lunches crop up.
She didn’t expect ‘Lunch B’ to appear again so soon, given there was one only last Wednesday. But on Monday morning, George’s PA Bethany put one in the diary for 1p.m. on Thursday, and given that today, Thursday 28 June, is a rare day without a PTA coffee morning or a WI planning meeting or a school sports day or a class assembly, Kate knows that today is her one shot. She can finally find out what the hell is going on with her husband. George was never terribly communicative or loving, not like him , but he’d definitely been even colder and more awkward of late.
In the hazy carriage, Kate ponders her strategy: if George meets a city guy in a suit, she will head straight back to Claresham in time for the school run. If he doesn’t… well, the school run will be the least of Kate’s problems, and she’s sure Melissa or Venetia would help her out in an emergency…
As the train rolls across the country and starts to gather speed, Kate feels increasingly nervous. She presses her head back into the headrest and feels the tie of her ponytail bobbling into the back of her skull uncomfortably, taunting her on her way. She shifts her head, turning towards the window as she hears the impending doom of familiar voices from the village, advancing through the carriage towards the front of the train.
‘Keep going, sweetpea…’ says a clipped voice knowingly. Kate slinks a little in her seat. She can hear it’s Antonia Barrie from the WI, not just from Antonia’s smug intonation but from the sound of her polished heels walking the dirty carriage floor disdainfully, in unison with another pair. Kate scrabbles to put her sunglasses back on before the heels arrive at the point where she’s slinking deeper into her seat. In her peripheral vision, Kate sees a younger woman pass first. It’s Antonia’s daughter, Amber, equally sickeningly glamorous and as well put together as her mother.
Amber Barrie is the most poised twenty-two-year-old girl Kate has ever seen, and whenever Kate stumbles into her at WI fundraisers wearing pretty floral shift dresses, or at the supermarket checkout in skintight leggings and a bodywarmer, her basket filled with kale and quinoa, or walking her German Spitz Klein on the green with her hair effortlessly piled high in a bun on her head, Kate can’t help but feel intimidated. Amber Barrie is everything Kate wasn’t at twenty-two, and everything Kate isn’t at forty-two.
As she glides past, fragrantly, ahead of her mother, Kate can’t help but look up. Amber wears a blush pink skirt suit, and her long tanned legs stride through the carriage in elegant nude stilettos that won’t be sullied by the capital’s streets today. Amber’s meticulous mane is the same golden blonde shade as her mother’s, although Antonia’s hair isn’t quite as long and lustrous as her daughter’s, but both always look as if they’ve just had a blow-dry. No one can always have just had a blow-dry.
Gosh, how does she walk in those?
Kate snaps the heels together of her black round-toe ankle boots that are looking a little like Cornish pasties they’re so loved, but which were the most comfortable option for all the walking she might do today, and drags her feet under her seat. She looks back out of the window. She’s seen enough, and doesn’t want to be seen.
With a swish of her hair, Amber presses the button on the internal door and eases through to the next carriage, her mother following close behind. Kate holds her breath, willing Antonia not to stop and see her.
Phew. Although I’m sure she saw me out of the corner of her eye.
Once Antonia has passed, Kate quickly looks up at the back of her. She is dressed almost identically to her daughter, although her two-piece is cream and the elegant hemline of her pencil skirt is longer, to the knee, and more befitting a fifty-something. She wafts through the doors, confidently, dismissively.
Kate clutches her doughy stomach, easing her hand over her full bladder. She is nervous about what she’s about to do, and irked that Antonia Barrie pretended not to see her, even though she pretended not to see Antonia Barrie .
She turns her gaze once more out of the window, at the sprawling green flats of East Anglia. The feeling of the unfamiliar envelopes her, and she rummages in her bag for a bottle of water.
This is ridiculous. I did this five days a week when I was pregnant with Chloe.
The tracks used to be familiar. Kate worked in London ever since she started her graduate trainee job at Digby’s, but routines of motherhood and mundanity mean she hasn’t been into London since…
Oooh, was it Wicked ? That was my fortieth, and George drove because we’d just got the S-Max. He wanted to give it a run-out.
Kate unscrews the lid of the warm bottle of water and lingers over her fortieth birthday weekend. Dinner with Christine and Colin Leach on the Friday. The kids made her breakfast in bed on Saturday morning, then George surprised her with a trip to the theatre and a night in a London hotel. He’d got her parents over to babysit, and as Kate looked in the mirror and congratulated herself on her half-stone loss at Weight Watchers in the run-up to her birthday, she had a pang of guilt that she didn’t really want to be in a dusty hotel room in Bloomsbury; she would have been happy with a takeaway at home with the kids.
That half-stone went straight back on in a birthday blowout. The show was amazing. The kids were fine for the night. Kate and George even had sex. It was the last time they had had sex, in fact.
Golly, over two years ago.
Kate looks at the clock on her phone and ponders whether it’s worth doing something else before she goes and camps out in the coffee shop. Perhaps she should head to the big John Lewis to get the kids some summer swimwear? Maybe the National Gallery ?
Then she remembers Him. The artist. The Mexican.
I’ve been cheated on before.
Kate’s cheeks feel hot and she takes another slug of water. The butterfly motifs on her T-shirt retract through the fabric into her stomach and she feels them flying around her, uncomfortably trying to escape. Ahead, she can see a skyline of new shapes she doesn’t recognise, and Kate wants to shrink with every metre she edges towards George’s city, his street, his building, his corner office. She feels deceitful as she agonises over what she’s about to do, yet proof of deception would be the only reassuringly familiar thing for Kate right now.
She remembers how small she felt that sticky night, when the boy she had been dependent on all summer, the life and soul of her trip, of the town, cheated on her, right in front of her very eyes. Kate had turned to say something to Hector, who was sitting next to her, but only saw the back of his head. His soft brown curls, his terracotta-toned neck, his torn faded band T-shirt, his trapezius she so wanted to touch. His arms, despite being just a boy of eighteen, were strong from arching and reaching to paint his mural he had been working on all summer. Kate had looked at the back of his warm body sitting on the stool next to her. She could smell musk and sunshine emanating from his skin, even in the smoke-filled darkness of the bar. She wondered who he was chatting to so intently, who he was sitting so close to. Kate cocked her head and felt a blow to the stomach. She withdrew her hand from his denim-clad thigh and gasped in a blaze of dry ice as the band played ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, unaware that one girl’s world had just stopped turning. Kate felt crushed and foolish to see her teenage lover, his tongue dancing with that of the beautiful girl next to him. He was cheating on her right in front of her.
At least I knew .
Kate had stood up and run to the toilets, shocked and embarrassed to see her summer romance in such a reckless and passionate embrace with Dani, the girl sitting on the stool on the other side of him, his paint-stained hands holding the girl’s face in a brazen clinch. They didn’t notice Kate noticing. They didn’t see her get up and run off. The band carried on while Kate took deep breaths in a toilet cubicle as she clutched a palm to a heart that Hector Herrera had just broken.
There were no secrets.
Kate packed up and left the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Senora the next day, one week earlier than planned. She told Sister Miriam that she was going to make an impromptu trip to see friends in Guanajuato before flying home. She didn’t have any friends in Guanajuato, but she was too humiliated to stay, to see Hector. She never did see Hector again. But Sister Miriam, Sister Juana and Sister Virginia, who had once had her heart broken, all hugged Kate tenderly and thanked her for her work helping to renovate and paint the villa over the summer.
‘The kids won’t believe their eyes when they get back from Coatepec!’ Sister Miriam gleamed over her spectacles as she clasped Kate’s hands. ‘Thanks to you. And Hector, wherever he is… You were a good team.’
Sister Virginia gave Kate a sisterly hug. She knew what young Hector was capable of, and how vulnerable a twenty-two-year-old heart is. Sister Juana gave Kate a parcel of polvorones for her fourteen-hour bus trip to Guanajuato, which Kate unwrapped in the living room of her parents’ home in Norfolk less than forty-eight hours later.
They were happy to have their daughter home and didn’t ask why she had returned a week early. Kate’s family didn’t really ask each other questions.