As Good As It Gets? Page 27

  I climb into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition. A tiny leaf is clinging to the top of Will’s head. Normally I’d pick it off, but he’s emitting powerful don’t-touch-me vibes.

  ‘The thing is, Will,’ I start, trying to order my thoughts, ‘it didn’t quite happen the way I thought it did. With Rosie, I mean. And Fraser.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he asks gruffly.

  ‘I mean, he didn’t just leave us. Well, he did, but not the way I thought he did.’ I clear my throat. ‘His mum told him I’d phoned to say I hadn’t gone through with the pregnancy, that I’d had an abortion—’

  In an instant, his expression changes and the anger fades. His eyes focus on mine. ‘Christ, Charlotte.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  He pauses, and for a moment, I think he’s going to reach for my hand, but instead, he rubs his eyes and sighs loudly. ‘So he never knew he had a child?’

  I shake my head. ‘Even when he saw us in that magazine, he didn’t realise she was his.’

  Will frowns. ‘Isn’t he very good at maths then? Or doesn’t he know how long the human gestation period is?’

  I throw him a sharp look. ‘They got her age wrong in the interview, remember? They said she was fifteen so he assumed I’d got pregnant by someone else …’

  ‘Charming. So what now? I s’pose he’s going to be part of our family, is he?’

  ‘Will, please. We’ve always known she’d want to meet him at some point …’

  ‘Yeah, when we felt it was right. I always imagined we’d be in control of the situation, you know? So we could talk to her first, and decide if it was the right thing to try and track him down …’

  ‘It’s just the way it’s happened,’ I insist. ‘I know it’s not perfect, but then, nothing is.’

  ‘No, it certainly isn’t.’ He turns away, staring pointedly out of the side window, as I switch on the ignition and pull out.

  As we drive home in silence I try to adjust to the possibility of my husband leaving me. To think, I’ve felt mildly rejected when he’s edged over to the far side of the bed. And now he wants to relocate as far away as humanly possible from me, whilst clinging on to the very northernmost tip of mainland Britain. Hell, why not go the whole hog and move to the Shetland Isles, or Iceland, or the North Pole? Sure, it’d be chilly, but with his two identical cashmere sweaters – presented by his mother and me on his birthday – and worn on top of each other, I’m sure he’d be perfectly cosy.

  ‘What shall we tell the kids?’ I ask finally, as we near our own street.

  ‘I think we should just be completely honest.’ Unlike you, he adds silently.

  ‘Fine, but how d’you think they’ll react?’

  ‘I think they’ll be okay,’ he says, blithely, as if we are about to break the news that we are choosing a new colour for our front door.

  Zach and Ollie’s friends have gone, and we are greeted by evidence of extreme over-ordering from our local Indian. ‘Want some, Mum?’ Ollie asks, indicating the cartons of cold curry strewn over the coffee table in the living room. ‘There’s tons left. Look – we got Peshwari naan just for you …’

  ‘Thanks,’ I murmur, trying to look pleased.

  ‘Where did you go anyway?’ Rosie wants to know.

  ‘Uh, just out for a drive,’ Will says.

  ‘A drive,’ Ollie sniggers. ‘That’s such an old peopley thing to do. I mean, what’s the point?’

  ‘It’s enjoyable,’ I fib, because he’s right: there was no point at all. Will’s mind is made up and, even if he doesn’t get this job, he’s obviously decided to cast the net far and wide in his search for employment. Well, fine. To show Will how completely fine I am, I grab the untouched naan and rip off a huge piece.

  ‘Don’t understand why you like Peshwari,’ Ollie scoffs. ‘It’s sweet and almondy. It’s all wrong in a bread-type scenario.’

  ‘It’s delicious,’ I retort, although right now, with Will revving himself up to tell the kids about his plans, I don’t remotely feel like eating. My teeth sink into the spongy bread. Although I’m sure it is delicious, and that the Bombay Star hasn’t altered its recipe, right now it seems to have the taste and texture of an insole.

  ‘Want some more?’ Ollie asks, waggling the oily dough in my face.

  ‘No, hon, I’ve had enough.’ I glance at Will, who is finishing what’s left of the chicken korma (he’s not having any trouble eating, I note).

  He clears his throat. ‘Erm, I’ve got a bit of news,’ he says, proceeding to tell them about zipping off to Inverness on Monday. Straight away, I realise that my anticipated awful, tearful scene isn’t going to happen because, rather cleverly, Will is presenting the possibility of this new job – ‘and it’s not definite, not at all,’ he keeps stressing, although of course it’s virtually in the bag – as a fantastic opportunity for boundless family fun.

  ‘Sounds great,’ Rosie marvels. ‘God, Dad – a director! That’s some promotion …’

  ‘I’d love to go there,’ Ollie adds.

  ‘Well, you can,’ Will enthuses, crunching a poppadom, ‘if I get the job …’ He is on the verge of leaving us. How can he keep on stuffing his face, forking great chunks of chicken into his gob like he hasn’t eaten for weeks? ‘It’s so wild and beautiful up there,’ he adds, biting into the last onion bhaji.

  ‘How d’you know?’ Ollie asks. ‘You said the first interview was on Skype.’

  ‘Yes,’ Will says, ‘but we had lots of holidays up there when I was a kid. I had an aunt up there, remember? Grandma Gloria’s sister who lived in Dornoch.’ Ah yes, I remember him describing Aunt Helen: tough, robust, her hair pulled back into a no-nonsense bun, in stark contrast to Gloria’s beauty contest glamour. Then he’s off again: enthusing over white sand beaches and turreted castles peeping out from dense pine forests, while I try to pick a bit of naan out of my right molar.

  Maybe it is for the best, I decide. What kind of marriage is this, if all this planning has been going on and he hasn’t thought to involve me in any of it? I try to catch his eye as he talks. It’s as if I am not even in the room.

  ‘But if you get it,’ Rosie says, frowning, ‘when would we actually see you?’

  ‘I’d be home some weekends,’ Will says, still avoiding looking at me at all, ‘and you could come up, of course. It’s only a ninety-minute flight. You’ll be there before you’ve even finished your tub of Pringles …’

  ‘Are Pringles free on planes?’ asks Ollie, who can barely remember flying anywhere.

  ‘Er, I think so,’ Will replies. ‘Probably. Honestly, you’ll love it. It’s not just seals up there, you know. There are dolphins, porpoises, minke whales … even ospreys. D’you know what they’re like, Ollie?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re massive birds of prey.’

  ‘… with nests the size of rafts,’ Will surges on, ‘big enough for a grown man to float in …’

  ‘Cool!’ Ollie exclaims.

  ‘Could we fly on our own, Dad?’ Rosie asks. ‘Without Mum, I mean? I’m old enough …’ It feels as if that wretched piece of naan has lodged itself in my throat.

  ‘Sure,’ Will says. I get up from the sofa, stride through to the kitchen and open the fridge. Although I take out a bottle of fizzy water, wine is what I want. Wine, of any kind at all – at this point I’m not fussy – tipped hastily down my throat. Tragically, there doesn’t seem to be any. Why is this so? We always have a bottle or two hanging about. We should have another stash, hidden away: emergency wine.

  By the time I rejoin my family, they are busily planning many jaunts. These appear to involve independent travel and boat trips while, presumably, I am left at home to trundle back and forth to a crisp factory in Essex and conduct an endless, fruitless search for our lost rabbit. They don’t realise – and nor would I want them to – that Will’s thrilling adventure is actually his way of leaving me.

  Unable to join in with the jolly conversation, I wander off to re-check Guinness’s
sleeping quarters, then slope back into the kitchen, feeling all at sea here, in my own house: redundant, really.

  ‘Can we go, Dad?’ Ollie’s voice rings through the house. ‘Can I bring Saul as well?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Will replies.

  I sit alone at the kitchen table, sipping my glass of water. In fact, I’d rather be here than squashed on the sofa with Will and the kids. I can’t bear to watch him being cheery, poppadom-crunching Dad when he’s on the brink of ending our marriage. I can hear it all, despite being in a different room – do they always talk so loudly? Will is on about basking sharks now; gentle creatures who glide through the sea, mouths wide open to allow billions of plankton to float in. It’s like a nature documentary without pictures.

  A sea sponge, that’s the kind of sea creature I’ll be. What little factlet did Ollie tell me about them again? That they can’t be bothered to do it, even if they meet a really good-looking sea sponge, haha! Well, I reflect, glimpsing Tricia through our kitchen window, pegging out Gerald’s enormous Madras-checked underpants, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I’d just bob about, bothering no one. I wouldn’t even think about sex or love or being fancied; I’d just be there.

  Yep, that’s what I’ll be, I decide, grabbing my bag and slipping out quietly to the off-licence for wine.

  They’re still chattering away in the living room when I come back. I don’t think anyone’s even noticed that I’ve been out. So I pour a big glass and take it upstairs, where I sprawl on our bed with my laptop and Google ‘distance London Inverness’.

  559 miles, it says, which suggests that Will craves more than ‘a bit of space’.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I’m not sure how Will and I get through the period leading up to him stepping onto that plane, where the living is easy and the Pringles are free. Actually they’re not; they are £1.80, sour cream or paprika – not a Lobster Bisque to be had – from what EasyJet grandly term their in-flight ‘bistro’. I know this because I’ve checked.

  This is the kind of person I have become: an obsessive checker of details, in between glaring at Will’s best suit which hangs, interview-ready and sheathed in clear plastic, on our wardrobe door. It’s very smart: charcoal, with a fine, paler stripe. I’ve rarely seen him wearing a suit at all, and am almost tempted to ask him to model it for me, just so I can hold in my head an image of a different Will – assured, professional, Director Will – in case I never get a chance to see him that way. But I suspect he’d think I was taking the piss, and I’m at pains to avoid any more bickering before he leaves.

  In fact, it feels as if our life is being carefully stage-managed to minimise any difficult moments. Will is being extremely polite and rather sweet to me, as if I have just returned from a lengthy stay in hospital. I almost expect him to bring me grapes, or a copy of Woman’s Weekly. And when I spot him peering at grey seals on his laptop, he quickly shuts down the page as if it’s porn.

  On Friday morning – a work day, when I’d usually snatch a piece of toast – I am presented with perfectly soft and melty scrambled eggs, accessorised with snipped chives. I look at the chives, wishing I could interpret them as evidence that Will loves me madly and that I’m forgiven for meeting Fraser and being such a thundering disappointment of late. But I can’t. Whichever way I look at them, they are just flecks of oniony herb.

  Anyway, I have no appetite whatsoever, so the eggs remain barely touched. Perhaps this is one advantage of Will and I having ‘space’. My favourite work skirt now sits at hip level, rather than digging into my waist; even my matronly sausage-boob seems to have deflated. My face looks a little slimmer than how it appeared in Front magazine, even without Boo’s endeavours with all that blusher and shader. I wouldn’t say it’s an improvement, though. I look tense and faintly unwell, and definitely lacking in cheek glow and eye sparkle. One small consolation is the fact that Sabrina, Tommy and Zach have gone away to visit Tommy’s mother. I seem to run into Sabrina constantly these days, and she’s the type to home in on a change in appearance. Although I do enjoy her company, I’d rather not have to explain what’s going on. Now yet, anyway. I do, however, manage a snatched phone conversation with Liza when I arrive at work.

  ‘I know it’s not great,’ she says, ‘but if he does get the job, he can still come home at weekends, can’t he?’

  ‘That seems to be what he’s planning,’ I admit.

  ‘It might even be good for you,’ she suggests. Hmm. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. ‘It’s doable, isn’t it?’ she adds.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say reluctantly, thinking it would be okay, if Will was desperately upset at the prospect of being parted from me. But he’s not; in fact he seems positively buoyant. Weirdly, it’s almost like having my old Will back, when he was happy, beavering away at Greenspace Heritage, and never did that nostril-flaring thing at me.

  In the office now, I barely look up from my screen, apart from to briefly speculate with Dee as to why Rupert is so antsy, and joke whether he’s gone off us, his ‘favourite girls’, because he’s barely stopped to say hello. We don’t mention Frank, or the beary-beary-much card. I wonder if it’s still in Dee’s drawer. For days now she’s said nothing about soft furnishings, or the shortlist of tile colours she and Mike have arrived at for their bathroom. We don’t speak of any of that. We just clatter away on our computers and make many calls. Rupert fails to put in an appearance all day; I leave a message with Rhona, his secretary, explaining that I’ll have to take some time off next week, with Will not being around. I also leave a message on Rupert’s mobile, reiterating that things are tricky at home, which he fails to respond to.

  Back at home, it’s sort of similar, in that Will and I don’t discuss anything serious either. Not Fraser, not Scotland, not the plight of the bottlenose dolphin. At the weekend, we have some ‘family outings’, as Rosie disparagingly calls them – although she seems to enjoy our trip to a pop art exhibition, and a meander around Portobello Road, which we haven’t done together for years.

  We are a family, I remind myself, as we sit in the sunshine clutching cartons of falafel. And we’ll still be a family when Will is in Scotland. Plenty of dads do that – work away from their partner and kids. We are strong enough to cope. Trouble is, I have a horrible feeling that Will is viewing this not as something to ‘deal with’, but as an escape.

  Rosie and Ollie barely stir in their beds on Monday morning as I tell them I’m taking their dad to Gatwick. Hardly surprising: it’s 6 a.m. Although Will had planned to take a cab, I have insisted on driving him. From Inverness airport he’ll pick up a hire car and drive north, along the beautiful coastline he spent many hours showing the kids; ribbons of white sand, and all that wildlife.

  I have adopted a matter-of-fact demeanour, although the effort of maintaining it is causing my left eye to reverberate disconcertingly. My stomach is churning, and it’s all I can do to focus on the road ahead. We don’t talk a great deal on the journey, and when we do it’s about the traffic (not too heavy) and the weather (breezy, pleasantly fresh). Will is obviously trying to rein in his excitement.

  Well, sod it all, I decide, after a brief, slightly awkward goodbye at the departure gate. I hope he gets the job. He needs it; he’s wilting away, fiddling about with his lettuces and herbs. While I know he’ll make sure he still sees the kids (‘You’ll be there before you’ve even finished your tub of Pringles!’), I know what’ll happen with us. Never mind our friend minke whale, with her alluring curves and elegant fins. He’s bound to impress the local human lovelies too, ‘hot dad’ that he is.

  In the airport car park, I’m just about to climb into my car when my mobile rings. ‘Charlotte?’ Rupert says. ‘Can you talk right now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘and I’m glad you called. Look, Rupert, I’m sorry about this—’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About asking for more time off without warning. You see, Will’s had to go away and I can’t expect R
osie to look after Ollie all week—’

  ‘Just take time off,’ he cuts in. ‘It’s fine, no problem. The thing is …’

  ‘Will’s applying for a job in Scotland,’ I blurt out, because I feel as if I can.

  ‘God, is he? Is that, um … a good thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit, climbing into my car, relieved that I work for a cuddly operation like Archie’s, not a vast, faceless company where holidays must be requested months in advance. ‘Well, not really,’ I add. ‘I mean, if he gets it, he’s planning to move north and the kids and I will stay in London. So, anyway,’ I babble on, trying to sound jovial and light, ‘you won’t be getting rid of me that easily.’

  I focus on a battered old buff-coloured Morris Minor which is trundling slowly around the car park. Rupert, I realise, has gone quiet. ‘Sorry to babble on,’ I say. ‘You wanted to talk to me …’

  ‘Yeah. The, er … the thing is, Charlotte, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m having this meeting—’

  ‘Not a gathering?’ I chip in, inanely.

  ‘Um, well, whatever it is, I’m getting all the staff’ – so we’re staff now, not teamsters – ‘to explain what’s happening at Archie’s.’ A small pause. The faint whiff of apple is still detectable in my car, even though I’ve tried to de-fruit it numerous times.

  ‘So what’s happening?’ I ask faintly.

  Rupert coughs. ‘We’re being taken over, Charlotte. I’m so sorry. I wish I was telling you this in person …’

  ‘You mean you’re selling the company?’

  ‘Yes, to Fielding Foods—’ Oh, my God. Fielding foods are huge: they make everything. Well, nearly everything: biscuits, breakfast cereals, nasty pasta sauces which seem to bear no relation to actual real, fresh tomatoes apart from being red – Will would rather eat plain, bald pasta rather than slathering it in that filthy stuff … my mind grinds to a halt. They also make crisps, of course: the cheap, everyday kind (ready salted, salt & vin, etc) sold singly in newsagents and in multipacks in every supermarket in the land. ‘… Been on the cards for some time now,’ Rupert goes on, ‘but, you know, confidentiality and all that …’