Miss You

TWENTY-THREE Gus

Nash was always on some dietary fad or other and she said I was the only person in the world who could make lentils delicious, so lunch at our house had become a regular event.

“You should go on MasterChef,” she said, ever eager to plot a new career for me.

“Do people really do that?”

“I was joking!”

Nash was finding it difficult to get work herself. She’d commanded such a huge salary in America that the roles that might now be big enough for her seemed few and far between. I think she was probably difficult to work with because she was always saying outrageous things about other actors. She enjoyed gossiping to someone who was completely outside her world and had nobody to tell. I learned more about her encounters with men than I wanted to know or she should have told me. “Too much information?” was one of her favorite phrases.

Occasionally in the afternoons, after I’d picked Flora up from school, Nash would accompany us to Kensington Gardens, where we’d sit on a bench chatting while the girls played in the Peter Pan park.

One Friday, an argument between my children broke out on the pirate ship.

Flora was always Wendy, while Bella took the role of Michael, who needed Wendy to look after him. Usually, the arrangement worked very well. But this time Bella had decided she wanted to be Tinkerbell.

“Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t!” Flora told her crisply, sounding uncomfortably like Charlotte.

“Why can’t?” Bella asked, not unreasonably.

“Girls,” I intervened. “Why don’t you take it in turns?”

Nash suddenly stood up.

“I’ve had it with you being such a bloody pain, Flora! You be Peter Pan and Bell be Tinkerbell for a change!”

I don’t know if it was the swear word that shocked my elder daughter, or just the novelty of someone telling her off, but she drew back, chastened, and Bella was allowed to whizz around ding-a-linging until she became quite breathless.

“Flora has too much of it,” Nash said.

I felt I’d been reprimanded.

“And Bell’s got to learn to stick up for herself,” she added.

“Yes. You’re right.”

“You don’t want her getting bullied when she goes to nursery school, do you?”

“No.”

Was this how bullying started, I thought, with the parents’ tacit permission? I needed to be more aware of it.

“What will you do, then?” Nash asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“God, you’re hopeless! Do you mind if I make a suggestion? Go to cooking school.”

“They cost the earth.”

“Well then, get a job in a restaurant for the lunch service, or something. There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant just down the road from you. Why don’t you talk to the chef? I’m sure you could come up with some sort of quid-pro-quo arrangement, like a kind of apprentice. You used to be a waiter, didn’t you?”

“Charlotte couldn’t cope with me waiting tables.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Nash, exasperated. “You always give the impression that your wife’s disappointed in you!”

I wasn’t aware that I gave any impression of Charlotte. I avoided talking about my marriage with Nash.

“She is disappointed in me,” I said.

“So what are you two doing together?” Nash demanded. “I just can’t see it. What do you have in common?”

“We both put our children’s interests first,” I said. I’d always had the tendency to sound pompous when cornered. “You’d understand if you had kids of your own,” I added, making it worse.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit! I know perfectly well what it’s like to be the child of parents who hate each other, thank you very much.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t always be sorry,” said Nash. “Hangdog is one of your least attractive looks.”

“Charlotte and I don’t hate each other, by the way.”

It was ironic that I said it on the very day that Charlotte informed me she was having an affair.

I’d suspected something because her conference weekends had become increasingly frequent. For some reason I’d envisaged him as younger than her, another student doctor, possibly, in a leather jacket, with longish hair, oozing sexual energy. I was, as usual, completely wrong, because he was considerably older than Charlotte, bald and big in pharmaceuticals. His name was Robert.

“Where did you meet?” I asked.

Charlotte was sitting on the opposite sofa in our downstairs room, studiously avoiding eye contact.

“At the theatre. He stepped in that snowy night you let me down,” she said. “Obviously, it didn’t start straight away.” She finally looked at me.

How long had it taken? I felt it would be ungentlemanly, somehow, to ask.

“So, why are you telling me now?”

“Well,” said Charlotte, as casually as if she were outlining her plans for the day, “the thing is, Robert wants us to go and live in Switzerland with him.”

“Us?” For a moment, I crazily thought that she was including me in this arrangement.

“The girls like him. He likes the girls.”

“Hang on! The girls don’t even know him!”

“They do, actually.”

Now Charlotte stared down at the floor.

“That week in Majorca,” she mumbled.

Charlotte had taken the girls to see her mother in Majorca by herself, claiming that it was so rare for her to spend quality time with them. I’d stayed at home to redecorate the children’s bathroom, which was becoming a little moldy and wasn’t good for Bella’s asthma. When the girls came back full of the things they’d done with Robert, I’d assumed that they meant Charlotte’s stepfather Robbie. How very convenient for Charlotte that the names were so similar.

Had she brought him along on their trips to see my mother too? Had Charlotte asked them to lie to me?

“That’s the only time,” Charlotte said, as if reading my thoughts. “I’m sorry I lied, but it was the only way I could think of testing the arrangement without raising the emotional stakes.”

“Quite right. Couldn’t have anyone getting emotional,” I said.

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,” Charlotte replied.

“So your mother’s given this Robert her stamp of approval, has she?” Somehow it was more humiliating to know that other people had been in on the conspiracy.

“Yes, she has. Not that that particularly matters to me.”

What did matter to her? What had ever mattered to her? I stared at my wife as if seeing her for the first time: a very attractive woman in her mid-thirties, at the peak of her career. I was no closer to knowing what was going on in her head than I had been the day we first made love in her attic room in the rooftops. Had it all been a sham? Or just the last couple of years?

“Well, I’m sorry to upset your carefully worked-out, emotion-free plans, but I won’t agree to it,” I told her. “I won’t allow you to take the girls away!”

“I don’t actually see that you have a choice,” said Charlotte. “How would you look after them on your own?”

“I’ll get a job!”

“And an au pair, because you’d have to work all the hours God sends to keep up the mortgage payments? That’s if anywhere will have you, with your work record!”

“We’ll have to downsize.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but prices are going up.”

“We’ll have to live somewhere outside London, then. People do, you know.”

I could hear myself speaking as if I was another person listening to me, and everything I said sounded lame.

“You might be prepared to let the girls descend to your reduced circumstances, but I’m not. And I’m their mother. Who do you think the courts will back?”

“You’d be prepared to put them through a custody battle, would you?” I desperately tried to regain the moral high ground.

“If you choose to fight me, you’ll be the one doing that,” she countered.

I found myself thinking that she could have been a lawyer. She had the cool, analytical brain for it. And then it dawned on me that she must have already talked to one. Robert probably had a legal team at his disposal. Charlotte had rehearsed every argument and I was at a total disadvantage. Perhaps I should ask for time out to prepare my own defense? I would call Marcus. In our unspoken competition, I’d now be the first cuckold, the first to get a divorce, the first to fight a custody battle.

“If we’d been a normal family, you wouldn’t have seen them so much during the week, would you?” Charlotte reasoned, moderating the sharpness of her tone.

A normal family. That’s what I’d wanted us to be. Had I let everyone down?

“Where in Switzerland?” I asked.

“Geneva,” she said. “Robert has a house with a view of the lake.”

About six months ago, there had been a conference there, I remembered. Or had there? Was that another convenient coincidence, or another lie?

“Have you got a job there?” I wanted to know.

“I’ve had various offers, but I’m not in a hurry. The girls will be my first priority.”

“That’ll make a change,” I said, acidly.

“I haven’t really had a choice, have I?” she snapped.

“I can’t see the advantage for the girls,” I said, realizing that the only argument I had a chance of winning was one about their future.

“There’s an international school just a block away. Bella won’t know any different. Flora is very adaptable, as we know.”

I took this to be a reference to the fact that Flora attended a state school rather than a private one, which Charlotte would have preferred if we could have afforded it.

“It’s a good time for them to move,” she added.

That was inarguable. If they were going to move, better when they were young, before they had established relationships with friends and teachers.

“Geneva’s a fantastic place to grow up. They’ll speak several languages, meet fascinating people. Robert’s a count, actually, though he doesn’t really use his title.”

“I thought Switzerland was a republic?”

Charlotte stiffened.

“He also has a chalet in Austria,” she said.

“You’re not thinking of letting them ski?”

“You can’t stop them having a full life just because of your guilt,” Charlotte said. The ghost of a smile swept across her face, as if she tasted victory.

“It’s not guilt, it’s rational fear—skiing’s dangerous, remember!”

I pictured my brother hurtling through the whiteness, glancing back over his shoulder to see if I was catching him up.

It was fear. But it was guilt too. We both knew it, although we’d never mentioned it in all the years we’d been together. Did Charlotte hold me responsible like my mother did? Had she been holding a knife behind her back all this time, waiting for the moment to stick it into my gut?

Is this your revenge, Ross?

How had I ever imagined that I would get away with taking his girlfriend? How could I have thought that I deserved my beautiful daughters?

“Nobody has to ski,” I said moronically.

And then suddenly I started crying. I hadn’t cried since I was thirteen. In my first term away at school, I’d learned how to keep it back because crying was for wusses. Now I was choking with tears, as if the reservoir of emotion that I’d dammed up for so long was all pouring out of my eyes and nose and mouth in a great, wet, drowning flood.

At one point, I felt a soft, tentative pat on my back and I shouted “Get off!” so violently, Charlotte snatched her hand back, as if from a live wire.

She waited until my shoulders finally stopped heaving, then handed me a tissue.

“You’ll still see them,” she said, emollient now, as if collapse signaled my defeat. “Geneva’s only an hour and a half’s flight. It really won’t be very different, except you’ll be the one who has them at weekends...”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I said, snorting back the tears, suddenly coldly determined. “They’re far too young to fly to London every weekend.”

“Well, once a month, then,” she said.

The terms were already worsening.

“Don’t you think we ought to see how the girls feel about this?” I suddenly asked.

Charlotte was visibly taken aback, as if I’d lobbed a fastball at her head. I could tell it was a scenario she hadn’t anticipated, and I could almost see her brain racing through the calculations, acknowledging it would be unreasonable to deny them a say.

“Let’s speak to them in the morning,” I pressed. “They’ll have the whole weekend to ask questions.”

“OK, but we must all be together,” said Charlotte, anxious to get the ground rules established. “And we have to keep it simple, no pressure... We’ll say something like ‘Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but—’”

“But that’s not true, not for me,” I interrupted.

Charlotte looked at me impatiently, as if I was unnecessarily trying to complicate things.

So I missed the opportunity to ask if, as her words had implied, she’d once loved me too, and tormented by that, and by all the questions Flora and Bell might come up with, I stayed awake most of the night until eventually succumbing to sleep in the pale chill of dawn.

I was woken by the smell of toast. Charlotte and the girls were already sitting at the table when I raced downstairs, bleary and disheveled.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” said Charlotte, making the girls giggle.

“Shall we have pancakes?” I said, attempting to recover lost ground, adding, when Charlotte shot me a glance, “We often have pancakes at weekends when you’re away.”

How unusual it was for the four of us to be together, I thought, my brain still raw and hollow from crying. Was Charlotte’s claim that it wouldn’t be so very different actually right? I poured myself a cup of coffee from the cafetière.

“We have something to tell you,” Charlotte said brightly, then looked at me.

I tried to remember the exact wording we’d agreed.

“Mummy is going to live with her friend Robert,” I began.

“One of the reasons is that I want to spend more time with you two,” Charlotte interjected, which sounded like pressure to me.

“The thing is, we both love you so much that we both want you to live with us,” I said, hating the speed at which it was all coming out. I looked across the table, expecting tears, but the children appeared only slightly curious as they spooned their cereal.

“Are you getting divorced?” asked Flora. It was a condition she was quite familiar with because several of her friends’ parents were separated.

I looked at Charlotte.

“In due course,” she said.

What were a seven- and three-year-old supposed to take from that?

“You can stay living here with me just as we are now, if you like,” I said.

“Or live with me in Robert’s house,” said Charlotte, glaring at me.

“I want to stay with Daddy!” shouted Bella immediately, as if it was some lovely sleepover we were talking about.

My heart felt as if it would burst with love, and a smile broke over my face like sunshine.

“What’s Robert’s house like?” asked Flora coolly.

“Well, it’s very big and it’s got a swimming pool,” said Charlotte.

“That’s not fair,” I muttered.

“Would you prefer me to lie?” Charlotte asked.

“Does it have a garden?” Flora wanted to know.

“An enormous garden.”

“Has it got swings?” Bella now chimed in.

“It’s not as good as Kensington Gardens...,” I countered, desperately.

“Why can’t you take it in turns?” Flora suddenly beamed, as if she’d hit on the obvious solution.

“We will be taking it in turns,” said Charlotte, her brain more alert than mine to the possibility of breaking the impasse. “The only thing we need to decide is which place you’ll go to school. Bella will be starting school soon, won’t you, darling?”

“Will you take me to school, Mummy?” Bella asked.

“Yes, I will. Won’t that be fun?”

Marcus put me in touch with a female divorce lawyer who was fierce but offered little hope. She intimated that it would be less damaging for the girls if I behaved as if I thought the whole thing was a good idea. To my surprise, Nash concurred, saying that the worst thing about having separated parents was the strain of pretending to each one that you were happier with them than the other. I think I’d secretly been hoping that she would insist on me putting up more of a fight.

“But going to court won’t restore the status quo, will it?” said Nash, making me understand that what I wanted was impossible.

My decision not to contest at least ensured that I would have the girls every other weekend and every holiday.

I met Robert, choosing Kew Gardens as the venue. I’m not sure why, because I’d never been there in my life, but I thought it would be somewhere we could walk undisturbed and he wouldn’t be able to dodge any difficult questions. It’s actually a wonderful place with amazing Victorian glasshouses, but I doubt I’ll ever go there again.

As I parked on Kew Green outside the big wrought-iron gates, I noticed a man a few cars along pointing his key fob at a little green electric car, and thought how silly and toy-like it was for someone so tall and distinguished. Never imagining that Charlotte’s lover would drive anything less flashy than a convertible white Audi, I walked behind him all the way to the Orangery cafeteria, our agreed meeting place.

After a couple of minutes standing awkwardly by the cutlery island, Robert was the one who dared to approach me with eyebrows raised, smiling and offering a firm handshake, as if we were about to start a business meeting,

“Angus?”

“Robert?”

My first reaction was a strange sense of relief, because he was so much older than me that people were bound to mistake him for my children’s grandfather. Perhaps because of the age difference, I couldn’t seem to feel much anger towards him. Ultimately, it was Charlotte who had decided to leave me; Robert couldn’t have enticed or persuaded her against her will. If wealthy and well-preserved was what she wanted, I was never going to be able to compete. Clearly a rich and powerful man, Robert sat on the board of an arts foundation and an opera company, and although he was wearing jeans and a coral Ralph Lauren polo shirt on the day we met, I could easily picture him in formal dress at the Salzburg Festival, with Charlotte beside him in a fabulously expensive ballgown.

He was open about his history as we strolled down the Broad Walk towards the lake. Amicably divorced from his first wife, with whom he had a son who held some post in Brussels, he clearly had no desire to take my place in Flora and Bella’s lives, but he said perceptive things about them to demonstrate that he was sensitive to their needs.

“If your daughters would be living with us, it would be an honor for you to visit my house,” he promised.

I couldn’t quite work out how it was that I was the one who would appear uncivilized if I turned the offer down.

“We don’t say that,” I heard myself saying.

“Excuse me?”

“In English, we say, ‘If your daughters were living with us...,’” I told him, feeling a tiny, idiotic fillip of triumph as momentary embarrassment furrowed his assured Eurocrat brow.

“Also, I will ask Flora and Bella to correct my English!” he laughed, smoothly re-establishing his composure.

When we parted at the gates a couple of hours later and he raised his hand in a friendly wave, I felt almost sorry for him taking on the icy presence of Charlotte, although I was sure he would know exactly how to deal with her. And when things with Charlotte were going well, I remembered dismally, she wasn’t cold at all.

Charlotte took the girls to say goodbye to my mother, because I was still smarting from her response, when I phoned to tell her the news.

“I’m astonished it’s lasted as long as it has.”

At the ages of seven and three, the girls couldn’t really imagine how different their lives were going to be, and it didn’t occur to them to be sad. I tried not to show them how miserable I was, but I didn’t want them to think of me as uncaring when they came to realize that the arrangement wouldn’t be as equal as they’d been led to believe. During our last few days together, we did our favorite things, and they were astonished to be allowed all the sweets and ice creams they asked for. I hugged them a lot, and said things like, “I will miss you very much!” and “Remember that you can always call me, or Skype me. Mummy and Robert both know how to do that, so just ask them to help you!” and even, a little melodramatically, “I love you so much and my life won’t be the same without you!”

To which Flora responded, “But you’ll still be in our house, won’t you, Daddy? And our room will be the same? And we’ll come for weekends and holidays just like Harry and Hermione and Ron do from Hogwarts?”

On the last evening, I cooked a family meal of their favorite tricolore salad and pasta alla carbonara with strawberries and ice cream for dessert, and, after they had eaten, and clobbered me at tennis on the Wii, they went up to bed and were asleep within seconds of me closing the last page of A Bear Called Paddington.

I sat in the dark for a few moments, inhaling the indescribably comforting smell of just-bathed children, listening to the peaceful stillness of them sleeping, with fat wet tears rolling down my cheeks.

Charlotte was still sitting at the table when I went downstairs.

“That was more carbs than I’ve eaten in a year,” she said, stretching back on the sofa.

Automatically, I began to collect up the plates.

“Don’t,” she said, pointing at the ceiling. “You’ll wake them.”

I sat down opposite her, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, like a child who’s forgotten to bring a handkerchief to school.

“I’m sorry it’s so hard for you, Angus,” she said.

“Are you?”

The last thing I wanted to be was petulant after being so decent about everything, but all the defenses I’d erected were collapsing around me.

“I tried, Angus. I tried so hard. I really did...”

Suddenly I realized she was crying too. I couldn’t remember seeing her cry before. Not since Ross’s funeral.

“The thing is, you’d never give an inch, never compromise,” she choked.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Me? Me? She was turning it all the wrong way round. We’d always done what she wanted, not what I wanted.

“...the pressure of being the only one who’s earning... of looking after everyone... it just didn’t seem to occur to you... you just didn’t get it! Did you ever for one minute think whether I’d like to spend time with my children? I didn’t want to be a full-time mumsy mum, no, but most people get a little balance!”

“But I thought—” I’d assumed that her career was the most important thing to her. She always seemed pleased to be freed from the day-to-day grind of keeping house.

“Did you, though? Did you ever actually think?”

Clearly not as much as I should have done.

Charlotte took a deep breath. “I know you were trying to exorcise Ross, when we first...”

His name jolted because it had always been a taboo word for us.

“...but didn’t it ever occur to you that I was too? I was going to marry him, Angus, and my whole life was turned upside down. I had to learn to look after myself. I didn’t know how to talk to people without being this tragic figure. When I went out with men, I dreaded the moment they’d ask, ‘Why is someone as pretty as you still single?’ With you, I didn’t have to say anything.”

I stared at my soon-to-be ex-wife. I was about to face a future without her, and now it was as if the past had happened without her too. I’d always seen her as coldly, sexily controlling, like the vampire in the photo on the mantelpiece. Now I wondered, if she’d dressed as an angel that day, in a white dress with wings, would I have thought of her differently?

“Sex with you was the nearest I got to oblivion,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No, I mean in a good way. It was like a drug. And when I fell pregnant, it seemed like, I don’t know... I couldn’t not keep the child... could I?”

“No!”

A world without Flora was unimaginable.

“We muddled through, for a while,” Charlotte said. “Didn’t we?”

I hadn’t looked after her. She’d needed looking after. She’d used the expression twice. And I’d thought I was good at looking after people.

An image of Charlotte kneeling on her bed in shell-pink Agent Provocateur lingerie on the night she told me she was pregnant flashed across my mind.

“Can’t you look a bit happier than that?” she’d said, and, then, in a small, wistful voice I’d never heard before or since, “It might be fun, don’t you think?”

“Couldn’t we still?” I now stammered. “Isn’t there a chance? For the girls? I’d do anything—”

“Oh, grow up, Angus, for God’s sake!”

She’d found someone to look after her now, and we both knew he’d do it so much better than I ever could.

The silence extended until I finally said, “I could do with a drink. Would you like one?”

She granted me a wry smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge, left over from some more convivial occasion. We clinked glasses.

“Truce?” Charlotte suggested the toast.

“Truce,” I echoed, though, typically, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing to.

“I knew it was never meant to be,” I said.

“Are things meant to be?” Charlotte asked. “If we lived our lives on that basis we’d never accept any responsibility.”

“I love my children,” I said.

“They’re still yours,” she said.

“We’ll have to find a way of making it work. For them.” I tried to sound grown up and responsible.

“I’ll drink to that.” Charlotte clinked my glass again, in comradely fashion, before retiring to her room.

The following afternoon, when I returned to the silent, empty house and noticed her half-full glass still standing on the dining table, I did wonder if it had all been a way of prepping me for not making a scene at the airport.