Chapter 38
38
NOVEMBER 2018, LONDON, ENGLAND
Kate swirls her teaspoon into a mug of tepid Earl Grey and wishes she had ordered coffee. She needs to feel alert for the showdown she’s about to have. She looks up towards the cafe entrance and tries to remember exactly what Bethany Henderson looks like. All she can remember is that she is young and blonde. And so unlike Kate.
Kate refused to let Bethany’s phone call ruin her big night, so she cut the conversation short by arranging to meet her on Monday. She was grateful that the chaos and candy floss and fun and fireworks enabled her to bury the news, for now. Being chair of the PTA was a timely distraction from the phone call from hell. She didn’t need to address it, nor even mention it to George until fireworks’ night was over and she was finally armed and ready with facts, not suspicions. Besides, this was Kate’s moment. It was the PTA’s most successful family fireworks party in history – Kate’s event raised ￡6,000 to go towards an outdoor classroom; last year, Melissa Cox had only just scraped four – she was not going to let the weekend be ruined by a phone call. Not when, deep down, she’d known something was coming all along .
As Kate collected empty firework cartridges from the school playground the next morning, and had space and fresh air to think, she worked out her strategy. She would keep schtum. Not give George an inkling that she was about to finally rumble him, because that would be showing her hand. She wanted to feel prepared. Ready for anything George might try to come up with this time. She agreed to meet his slut of a secretary on Monday lunchtime and hear her out – to ask why now – and then plan her next course of action. Since she received the phone call on Saturday, that sick feeling Kate felt twenty years ago in a bar in Mexico, when Hector Herrera cheated on her right before her very eyes, came back to wind her like a Catherine wheel doing loops in her stomach. As Kate’s muddy hands threw plastic cartridges into carrier bags, she realised that knowing the truth didn’t in fact make it better. She thought it would be preferable. At least Hector Herrera had drawn a neat line under their summer of fun – there was no grey area, no element of doubt, no unknown. The unknown had eaten Kate up for the past eight months. But drawing a line under marriage is a different matter, and knowing didn’t make it any easier to take.
Now, in a busy coffee shop near Liverpool Street Station, where Kate made the mistake of ordering an Earl Grey instead of a coffee, she twists the scrunchie clasping her low ponytail tight and tries to remember what Bethany Henderson looks like. She remembers the hair on George’s scarf; that mass of long blonde hair swishing down her back as she leaned into George that day Kate walked in on them and George said he was in the middle of firing her.
Kate shudders.
A young woman with blonde hair and a circular, passive face walks in. She is wrapped in a white puffer jacket belted at the waist with a white faux-fur-trimmed collar. Not all that dissimilar to Kate’s navy parka. Kate remembers her now and is surprised by how plain she is.
Bethany recognises Kate from the awkward family portrait that sat in a thin silver frame on George’s desk. She feels guilt rise up inside her under her marshmallow of a coat but powers on, through her nerves, to walk across the cafe.
‘Hi,’ Bethany says defiantly and pulls out the seat at the little square table.
Kate is so used to being polite, to smiling, to apologising, that it feels so uncomfortable to her that the lines of her mouth are staying straight.
Bethany pulls a bottle of water out of her bag as if to explain why she isn’t going to the counter to get a drink. It’s obvious she wants to make this as quick and as painless as possible.
‘Why did you call me?’ Kate asks with a wan expression. ‘I was getting used to the idea – you know, “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you”? We were getting to a happy place again.’ Kate can barely look at Bethany’s face, but she does and sees her blue eyes are sad and cold. She looks like the one who’s been betrayed.
‘I thought you should know.’
‘I’m not sure I want to know now.’
‘I think you do – that’s why you came to the office that day. The day?—’
‘The day I caught you and my husband at it?’
‘ What? ’
‘The day I walked in on you… you… going “down” on him, and you made it look like he was firing you. Very clever.’ Kate is horrified to have to spell it out, and her voice cracks in the loud cafe .
‘The day he fired me’ – Bethany’s passive face suddenly becomes animated, as if there is some substance to her – ‘ I didn’t do anything wrong. I just told him I thought what he was doing was wrong.’
Kate feels rage in her hot face.
The cheek of the woman!
She lowers her voice to an angry hush. ‘Let me tell you, whether you’re single or not, however despicably George has behaved, you have done something wrong. George is a married man. We have children. Why would you want to break up a family? My family is everything to me!’ Kate’s wobbly voice breaks as she looks down at her off-white tea mug and tries to hold herself together. She blinks rapidly, to shoo away the tears, then looks out at the lunchtime bustle, at the worker bees around Bishopsgate, and wonders how George looked as he sauntered through it on his way to work this morning.
Cocksure.
‘Look, it’s not me he’s having an affair with.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not the one you should be angry with. I’m trying to help you out here.’
Kate is baffled. ‘Help me out?’
‘It stressed me out so much, I hated covering for them. For their filthy lunches, making lame excuses for him. I told Freya I didn’t like it at all.’
‘Freya? He’s having an affair with Freya?’
Kate thinks back to the girl with the glossy poker-straight hair and pert bottom.
‘No! Freya reckoned I should talk to him, let him know I felt uncomfortable with it. Then he fired me and gave Freya my job.’
‘So, hang on a minute… ’
‘But me and Freya are mates and we still meet up. It’s not her fault. Poor thing now has to do his dirty work for him…’
Kate can’t keep up and is struggling to take it all in.
‘So who is it? Who’s George having an affair with? And why are you telling me now, when you’ve known for ages?’
‘’Cause Freya hates covering for him as much as I did. She doesn’t want to lose her job – but me, I’ve got nothing to lose now, so I thought, sod it.’ Bethany gives a nervous laugh.
‘“Sod it” – you’re crushing me – breaking my heart and telling me out of spite?’ Kate squeezes the handle of her mug of tea.
‘Hang on a minute – me and my fiancé had just put an offer on a duplex in Chigwell. We’d been waiting for them to come up for months. We had to pull out when your dirty husband fired me unfairly. He’s screwing you over, but he screwed me over too.’
Kate looks at Bethany’s young joyless face and feels bad for her, for reading her wrong, for reading the situation wrong. ‘I’m sorry. Look, this is all a bit hard for me to process. First I thought he was having an affair with you, then he made out that I was going mad, and now this.’ Kate shakes two hands with fanned fingers out in despair. ‘I’m just a bit all over the shop at the moment.’ She tries to compose herself by drinking a sip of tepid tea and inhales a deep breath to steady her nerves. ‘I’m sorry for you, I really am.’
Bethany shrugs.
‘Have you found another job?’
Chit-chat steers Kate away from the question she really needs answering.
‘I had to threaten him for a good reference, said I’d tell you if he didn’t help me get another one. He’s lucky I didn’t make a case for unfair dismissal, but Mick told me it wasn’t worth the hassle. Slimy bosses always win. ’
Kate feels very uncomfortable with George being referred to as a slimy boss, even though she knows that’s exactly what he is.
‘So is that why you’re telling me, for your reference?’
‘No – I got another job in September, so I let it go.’
Bethany gives her rose gold Michael Kors watch a quick glance. ‘Actually, I can’t be long…’
‘So why are you telling me now? Why all these crank calls?’
‘Yeah, sorry about the calls – every time you answered I was scared to say it. But I just knew I had to. For Freya. For Mick. For the flat we lost. We can’t get on the property ladder now, prices have gone up even more since June… Anyway, it’s wrong. He’s been mugging you off for over a year, I reckon. Maybe two. I tried to go back over it all last night, but I couldn’t access my old work diary.’
‘Who is she?’ Kate asks before taking a deep breath and holding it.
‘He didn’t let on for a while – he’d just get me to book hotels and block out lunches.’
‘Which hotels?’ Kate gasps for air after she says it.
‘Sometimes The Rosewood, sometimes The Shard… She likes her luxuries…’
He took me to a dusty old hotel in Bloomsbury for my fortieth.
‘He’d get me to block out a couple of hours, once a week, sometimes twice a week. Said to put in the diary that he was having lunch with B. Sometimes Barry.’
‘Baz Brocklebank from the Sydney office?’
‘No, Barry was her last name.’
Kate suppresses a dry wretch.
Amber Barrie. I saw how he was all over her at the PTA summer social.
‘It wasn’t until he started getting me to send her flowers that I found out her full name and address. She lives in the same village as you.’
Kate’s ashen face falls.
‘I know,’ she says with a defeated sigh. ‘Amber Barrie. She lives at the Manor.’
‘I laughed cause Barry Manor sounded like Barry Manilow.’
Kate doesn’t laugh.
‘But her name isn’t Amber. It’s Antonia.’