The Reading Group Part 10

'I've been married for ten years.'

'Oh.'

Elliot carried on with his explanation, looking down at his plate, carefully laying out the facts his dark confession. 'My wife is called Clare. She's a midwife, up at the County.'

'Right.'

'We've been together since we were kids, really.'

Cressida pushed back her chair. 'Well, okay. Thanks for telling me. Don't know why you didn't before, really. Or why you are now, for that matter. It's not like we've done anything wrong. Just had a couple of drinks. And a chat.' It didn't feel like that, though. She felt like she'd been kicked. And she quite wanted to kick him back. She stood up.

'Listen, don't go, please. I want to tell you about it. We're... things aren't great... we can't...'

'Oh, Elliot, please.' Her tone was scathing. 'Don't turn in to Mr My Wife Doesn't Understand Me. I think you're better than that, and I know I am. I'll see you.' She turned towards the door.

'Cressida, hang on-' He was pulling money out of his pocket. 'Please, just let me talk to you about this.'

'Nothing to talk about, Elliot. Like I said, I'll see you around.' And she was gone.

She didn't see him around for a couple of weeks, almost long enough for her to stop half looking for him. Almost long enough for her to stop thinking about him when she dressed in the morning, wondering if he'd like this sweater, that hairstyle.

She was in a pub one night, karaoke night, with a crowd. One of the guys, a c.o.c.ksure South African called Rowan, was flirting with her, buying her drinks. She was almost falling for it, too. She let him request a song for them, laughed at the hysteria their crowd generated when their names were called out 'Christ, get a load of these two, Cressida and Rowan b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, they sound posh. Come on up, you two, you've requested a snazzy little number from Grease. Remember this one, "You're The One That I Want"? Olivia Newton-John in those skin-tight black trousers. Give it up for Cressida and Rowan...'

Rowan, who was a handsome brute, pulled her on to the stage, a.s.sumed a John Travolta swagger and began to sing.

'I've got chills, they're multiplying, and I'm losing control.'

Cressida glanced away from the autocue and saw Elliot, standing apart from the crowd, smiling at her. She felt an almost irresistible urge to go to him.

She finished the song, refused to comply with her companion's lurid dance moves and slipped off the stage, leaving Rowan Travolta to soak up the applause.

They talked, then, in his car. It was getting colder outside, and he had to put the heating on, so the windows steamed up. Elliot talked. And Elliot cried. And he said that he hated himself, his life and his weakness. But that she had to believe that this had never happened to him before. He didn't know whether it was because he'd given up on him and Clare, reached the end of his tether, or whether it was just that she was so lovely. But he couldn't help it. He hadn't meant to come tonight, just as he hadn't been at the bus stop, or on campus. He had tried to stay away. But he needed to be where she was G.o.d, he must sound pathetic, but that even if nothing happened between them, could she not hate him, not judge him, not never let him be where she was.

And so it had begun. Cressida couldn't quite believe that she was doing it. She could hear Polly's voice 'Did I not teach you more sense than that?' She had watched her own parents' marriage fall apart. And part of her hated how weak she was but a much bigger part had taken over. She told herself all sorts of things. It was amazing how you could make things sound okay, justify your behaviour, make it possible to live with yourself. She wasn't cheating on Clare, Elliot was. She wasn't cheating on Joe who knew what he might be up to at Warwick? Elliot and Clare were married in name only. Elliot couldn't leave her when she was so sad. All the cliches, and all the lies suddenly sounded believable. For a few days, a week or so, after that time outside the pub, whenever they met, they talked about Clare and Elliot. He told her everything: about the babies they'd lost, the treatment, and further back than that, about when they had been Cressida's age, and how simple it had all been then. And Cressida knew that what he saw in her was the people they had been, before life got so messed up for them. She was the blank canvas they had been before they got all Jackson Pollocked by life.

And when the talking part was over, and she thought she understood, Cressida went home alone one night and made her decision. She was going to do it anyway: she was going to be involved with Elliot.

The next time they met they made love. They parked his car, took a blanket from the boot, and walked for twenty minutes or so without talking. Then they took off some of each other's clothes, and lay down together. The watery sun was warm on their skin.

Cressida was nineteen years old and it was her first time. And it was what she wanted. In unspoken agreement, they never talked about Clare again.

And now she had told him. She had tried not to think about how incredibly potent this information would be for Elliot, because to do so would be to acknowledge Clare and the tragedy of her childlessness, and she didn't want to do that, not now.

But as soon as she had said it, lying here in Clare's barren house, it hit her. He didn't speak. His first reaction had been to s.n.a.t.c.h away his hand from her stomach, as though it was red hot, and to sit up. He propped his elbows on his knees and hid his face in his hands. He looked vulnerable, naked, like that. His skin was so pale under his arms that it looked almost translucent, and she could see the blue veins beneath the skin. She didn't know what he was thinking. For the first time it felt cold on the floor, and a bit uncomfortable. She pulled herself up and sat beside him, careful not to touch him, although she wanted to reach out.

When Elliot lifted his face it was wet with tears. He was laughing and crying and shaking his head all at once. He still hadn't spoken, but now he pulled her on to his lap and cradled her in his arms.

Nicole and Gavin Venice was surely the most amazing city in the world. The sight that greeted you when your water-taxi rounded the last bend in the lagoon was the most delightful thing she had ever seen. She'd been to Venice in the summer, when it was overcrowded and whiffy; she'd been in the depths of winter, Interrailing when she was a student and it was so cold that you felt your feet might shatter if you stepped too hard on the pavement. But spring was definitely her favourite time. This morning the sky was a perfect blue, and the water was just lapping against the pavement. Nicole laughed.

Five minutes earlier she and Gavin had been entangled in a white linen sheet sideways across their mammoth hotel bed. She had just given him, if she said so herself, a h.e.l.l of a good time, and she was lying back against the pillows, her hair tangled, the sheet covering one breast, triumphant. Gavin looked at her, then jumped off the bed. 'I want a picture of you, looking just like that. Don't move.'

He grabbed the camera.

Nicole giggled. 'You what?'

'I want to remember you with that cat-that-got-the-cream expression on your face.' He clicked. The flash made her blink.

'I reckon this is how all the artists got their best pictures, don't you? Leonardo probably gave the Mona Lisa a jolly good seeing-to just before he painted her.'

'Interesting theory... What do you think Munch did?'

'Rogered them senseless.'

They were both laughing now.

'Or Pica.s.so!'

'Now you're really getting kinky.'

He was still holding the camera. 'No, not good enough...' And now he was jumping into his trousers, no underpants, pulling a sweater over his head. 'I need to capture the location as well. You...' and he pulled at her arms '... come and stand here, just like that, perfect, and wait there just a minute, just as you are.' And off he rushed with the camera.

So now here she was, naked but for a sheet, hair all over the place, standing at the window just above the A in Danieli, in the foot-high gold letters on the hotel wall. And down there on the pavement was Gavin, looking similarly tousled, but very tall, almost lost in a crowd of j.a.panese tourists, taking her photograph.

This weekend was turning out to be everything she had wanted. Gavin was back, they were back. And it was just as funny, and as close, and as s.e.xy and as right as it always had been.

It felt to Nicole as if her marriage was a roller-coaster, a white-knuckle ride. Here, at the top, the moments were perfect, and you could never remember how sudden, swift and petrifying the drops were. If you could, you'd never get back on the ride for a second turn. At the top, you'd say anything was worth it for the view, and the way your heart soared, and when you were at the bottom you'd do anything to be on the carousel instead. Nicole was sure she'd stolen that metaphor from a film, but it was exactly right. And, oh, how she was enjoying this ride. Maybe there would be no drop around the corner this time.

She lay down on the bed to wait for Gavin's return, put both hands on her stomach and wondered if she was pregnant already... she squeezed her eyes shut in a silent wish. The first time, with the twins, she had felt she knew the minute it happened. Gavin had laughed when she said so, told her she was confused by the quality of his lovemaking. But a couple of weeks later, before she had reason to do a test, he had watched her one morning, walk naked across their bedroom, and he had known it too. 'You're pregnant!' he had said. And she knew she was. Even though she had joked with him that he was just trying to tell her she was getting fat, they had both felt it.

She couldn't have said the same with Martha she had been exhausted by the incessant demands of two small boys (and one big one). She was too exhausted to plan a seduction, let alone a pregnancy, and, apparently, far too exhausted to take her mini contraceptive pill at the same time each day. The twins weren't even two when she became pregnant, and she would have liked to wait a little longer.

Gavin, in alpha-male style, was terribly proud of her fecundity or, rather, his ability to make her pregnant, chemical intervention notwithstanding. He deflected all her worries about not being able to cope. 'Look, sweetheart, we'll just hire people. I'm doing well at the firm so we can afford it. Stop worrying, be a lady of leisure, for G.o.d's sake. Be a cottage industry.' And he had made her hire someone to do the cleaning and the ironing, and to look after the children, and she had learnt to be a lady of leisure and that he thought she should be grateful that he paid, uncomplainingly, for all of these blessings. But, still, she looked at Martha and the boys, and she felt guilty. Especially about Martha: the boys had each other, but she worried that she hadn't spent enough time with her daughter.

Harriet pooh-poohed that. 'Cut yourself some slack, for Chrissakes. Those children adore you. You're the original yummy mummy, all slim and glamorous, and quality time-ish. Why should you feel so d.a.m.n guilty because you get someone else to do the Play-Doh and the snot? Madonna's never changed a nappy in her life, but do you think her kids are going to hold it against her?' Harriet was a fount of knowledge when it came to s...o...b..z trivia, and fond of using celebrity examples to justify civilian acts.

Gavin was even less patient about her guilt. 'Don't you dare stop going to the gym because you think the boys need you. What they need is a mother their friends all fancy when they're in senior school.'

At the book club last month they had got on to the subject of mothers feeling guilt and mothers condemning their children to repeat their own lives. They had all agreed that guilt and worry came with your milk, and stayed. Polly had looked at the young mothers, and said, 'And, believe me, the older they get the worse it is.' A cheering thought.

This time might be different, though, Nicole thought. The boys and Martha were at school. She had more time, felt more confident about how to be a mother, less tired. This baby could be perfect for all of them. Martha would love it she was pa.s.sionate about Baby Annabelle, a battered plastic doll who had to go everywhere with her own miniature equipment what fun she would have with the real thing. And Gavin loved his kids. She knew that. Whatever else those other women gave him, she was the only one who had ever given him a child. That t.i.tle was hers and hers alone.

Gavin ran in, pulled off his sweater, and jumped at her. 'What more can a man ask? A hot woman in a warm bed! Got the energy for one more before lunch?'

'You'd better make it a quickie you've promised me a Bellini at Harry's Bar.'

He looked at her in mock anger. 'I, Mrs Thomas, do not do "quickies". I am strictly a quality and quant.i.ty man, I'm afraid.'

'Well...' he was kissing her ear, exactly as she liked it. '... I suppose Harry could wait.'

Gavin groaned.

'Yes, I think he f.u.c.king well can.'

Later that afternoon they phoned the kids on his mobile from St Mark's Square. Martha wanted to know about the pigeons, George whether they were bored of looking at churches, and William whether they had bought him a present and if he and his brother were allowed to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer before bed.

'No, we jolly well haven't. And, no, you jolly well can't, cheeky devil. Go on then, ten minutes. But then straight to bed, no nonsense. You promise?' Gavin laughed. 'I love you too. Give each other big kisses from both of us. See you Sunday. 'Bye-'bye.'

'They sound fine, don't they?' Nicole asked, as he put an arm round her and they started walking.

'Yes, mother hen.' He kissed her cheek. 'You're a great mum, you know?'

She didn't remember him saying that before. She crossed her fingers in her pocket, made her mantra wish again. Please let me be pregnant. Please.

Harriet and Tim Harriet had been trying to hide it, even though he would of course see it eventually. He had usually showered, dressed and gone while she was still in bed, propped against pillows, drinking tea he made for her, and the children, usually Chloe first, the early bird, then Joshua, woken unwillingly by the noise of the house coming to life, would have crawled in beside her to watch cartoons as he left. Not this morning, though: he had an early appointment in the centre of town with their accountants, some pension thing or other, he had told Harriet, although she had forgotten, and so he could hang around, drop Josh at school for her.

When she remembered it now it irritated her, as everything about him did. She could hear the low hum of Radio 4's Today programme from his shower room, its sombre tones fighting with the talking badger the kids were watching. Even his own tea, next to hers on the bedside table, got up her nose: he usually grabbed a coffee at the station. The reality was that she liked him being gone. She was happy to deal with his was.h.i.+ng and his dry cleaning, his shoe repairs, and his paperwork, and even his phone calls home during the day. She just wasn't happy with him here in the flesh. Poor sod. She knew it was rotten, but she couldn't help it. And now he was going to see it. Six nights running she'd gone to bed in her knickers, which, these days, was not unusual, so he hadn't spotted it then.

The novelty of Daddy being home at this time had roused Chloe and won out over the television. She had sat on the deep windowsill and watched him shave, and now she was 'helping' him get dressed, a.s.serting with all the fervour a four-year-old can muster that, yes, the pink tie was the only choice. Her fringe was growing out and, in the early morning, before the tangles had been teased out and the hair elastic eased in, she had to tip her head right back to see out. Tim disappeared, came back with a hair-band from her bedroom, got down to her level and pushed it gently behind her ears, stopping to kiss her nose. Then he folded her into a lung-flattening squeeze.

'What have you lot got planned for today, then?'

'Same old same old,' Harriet muttered grumpily. 'Two school-runs, a ballet cla.s.s, a big food shop, oh, and some laundry five loads or so, just for fun.'

Tim looked like she'd smacked him. The inference was so clearly that all this domesticity was his fault. He was not foolish enough to suggest that she get some more help he had learnt that Harriet wasn't interested in solutions, although he would gladly employ a whole army to relieve her if he might get the sparkly, funny girl he married back as a result. He was afraid no, he knew, that the housework, and the childcare and the other things she moaned about weren't what she wanted to change. And that was not a place he wanted to go. So he said, 'Sorry, love. I should have remembered.' Answer the unspoken accusation. He turned to Chloe. 'Ballet today, is it, darling? Are you going to wear your blue or your pink for Miss Polly?'

'Pink. Pink. Pink.' Chloe pirouetted, her standard response to every question.

'What about you, Jos.h.i.+e? Football training after school today, is it?'

Josh answered without turning his head from the television. 'Yeah. Mr Cuthbert said he might give me a go in midfield this week.'

'Great. Good job we had that practice in the park at the weekend. You give him what for!'

Josh smiled. 'Yeah, I will. Thanks, Dad.'

Then Tim turned to watch Harriet on her way to the bathroom. He loved watching the way she walked. The extra weight she was carrying only made her more desirable her b.u.m wiggled. It always had.

Chloe's had the same lines in miniature. He loved that, the way Chloe's b.u.m proved she was Harriet's daughter he was forever looking at his kids to see himself those genetic characteristics that stamped Joshua and Chloe undeniably, publicly as his. Harriet didn't like him watching her, though. Not any more. She made him feel like a bit of a pervert sometimes. 'You're s.e.x-mad, you are.' She said that every time he tried to initiate something between them. Or 'You must be joking, mate. After the day I've had?' When she did submit, and that was what it felt like, never like she really really wanted to, she always made him switch off the lights. She said she didn't want him to see her wobbly bits. He thought maybe she didn't want him to see her eyes. Once he'd run his hand across her face, in the middle of it, wanting to be tender, and they'd been screwed tight shut.

Then he saw the tattoo. Left cheek, bottom right. Just inside where underwear would go. He could see the faint browny white line from where her swimsuit had ended last summer, and it was on the white. It was a small, pretty b.u.t.terfly, black in outline, with just blue and green, stained-gla.s.s shades with the tiny wings. It had healed completely she must have had it a week.

Suddenly Tim felt sick. He saw Harriet watching him. She stuck her chin up, defiant, but there was a tremor in her voice as she said, 'I got it last week. Some guy in Kingston did it for me. He was recommended. All clean needles and everything they're not like they used to be, these places. All government-controlled and everything. Tattoos are popular now, loads of people are getting them.'

Actually a tattoo hadn't been her first choice. She'd wanted a navel ring she thought they looked stunning. But a frank session in front of their mirror had convinced her that a jewel in her navel, stretched strange by pregnancy, flanked by two silver stretch marks and dimpled with wobbly flesh, would be (a) very hard to find anyway, and (b) make people feel sick. So a tattoo it had been, the b.u.t.terfly. And wasn't that what she was doing coming out of the chrysalis, finding her beautiful wings? Actually it was the prettiest design the guy had on the wall. Even Harriet thought the little devil was tacky. She didn't want some Beckhamesque Celtic or oriental symbol that purported to mean 'love and eternal peace' but might just as likely say 'kick me here'. The dove was cute, but an extra stone in weight could easily turn it into an albatross (around your a.s.s, not your neck), or a pelican. The weight thing could have been avoided by putting it on her ankle or shoulder, but she couldn't imagine crossing her legs at parents' evening or ever again wearing something strapless to one of Nicole's pompous charity-type dos with one there. So b.u.m it was. And she was b.l.o.o.d.y pleased with it it made her feel naughty and empowered although it had hurt like b.u.g.g.e.ry and, on the humiliation scale, ranked right up there with cervical smears. Although they were not, in her experience, performed by exceptionally good-looking, snake-hipped men called Troy. Troy, the tattoo 'artiste' had worn a very tight T-s.h.i.+rt proclaiming that he 'doesn't play well with others', which Harriet did not for one minute believe, and had referred to her b.u.m as a 'great canvas', which Harriet had thought was quite possibly the nicest thing anyone had ever said about it.

It had all been worth it. Even though Tim's face was making her feel less like a Spice Girl and more like Delilah by the minute. Well, she wasn't going to think about it. It was her b.u.m; to graffiti or not to graffiti it was entirely up to her. It didn't mean anything, did it, anyway?

Did he have to stand there looking all bruised? Tim stirred himself, looking at the kids, who were absorbed in Naomi the Origami Queen. 'Fair enough.' He came closer, bent down. Harriet made herself stand still. 'I quite like it, actually. Suits you.'

Which was the biggest lie he had ever told her.

All day, through the meeting at Baker Tilly, in the first-cla.s.s compartment of the train, across The Times leader page, at a sober lunch in Corney and Barrow, against the screen of his computer, and even superimposed over the image of his smiling family, gilt-edged security in their frame on his desk, a tiny b.u.t.terfly laughed scornfully at him.

Harriet and Nick It was uncomfortable holding a mobile phone under your ear and against your shoulder. Last year, in her stocking, Tim had given her a hands-free unit for it, 'so you can talk to Nicole for eighteen hours a day, instead of the sixteen you currently manage' but she knew that he knew she talked on the phone in the car on the school-run, and she figured that he was worried about Joshua and Chloe. Not that she used it. People wandering around apparently talking to themselves looked like care-in-the-community candidates. Or like ball-breaking career women still cheris.h.i.+ng the dialogue from Wall Street. Not that she would pa.s.s for a career woman, ball-breaking or not, in a mac with a greasy handprint down one side and what looked suspiciously like snot on the other shoulder. She looked every inch the hara.s.sed young mother. Except that she wasn't in the yoghurt section of the supermarket, she was in the lingerie department at John Lewis, oh yes, where she was looking for underwear to dispel the image of the mac. Not the sensible non-wired items in the colour they laughingly called 'flesh', or the big pants that weren't supposed to show under trousers, but the stuff with brand names that suggested s.e.x Appa.s.sionata, Silhouette, Fantasie, Rigby and Peller. Well, perhaps 'Rigby' didn't exactly suggest s.e.x, but my G.o.d the knickers did. Well, okay, that particular pair of knickers was actually just three bits of lace sewn together, and suggested yeast infection, but you get the picture.

Harriet was shopping for sin, and she was on the phone to Nick, having a conversation that she would later describe to herself in the Dear Diary internal monologue she had been forced to adopt since Nicole had made her feelings on the subject known as strictly X rated.

'Oooh,' Nick was saying, in a not at all John Inman way. 'Tell me more.'

'Black?'

'Black's good. Black and small.'

'Lacy.'

'Lacy's good. Transparent's better.'

It was a whole new world. Boyfriends before Tim hadn't taken much notice, they were usually in a rush to get it off you. Except for one who'd clearly seen too many Sharon Stone films and liked her to start the evening with nothing on underneath. Oh, and one who, again, was clearly under some celluloid influence and had ripped a pair of pants off her which, since they had been new, and not cheap, had proved not erotic but extremely irritating. Charlie hadn't been averse to a bit of a floorshow, but was just as happy to jump her straight after hockey training in her sweaty grey gear. Tim had always liked her naked. Or in white cotton. But best naked. Nick clearly liked things a little differently she got the feeling nipple-less and crotch-less might be right up his street, although she drew the line at those. Silly.

'Shut up, you dirty sod.' Harriet had seen the tiny, clenched saleswoman eyeing her distastefully. 'What are you calling me for?'

'You know what.'

She did indeed. 'I've told you. No.'

'I heard the words, but I didn't believe them. I can also hear the longing in your voice to say yes.'

'You are one arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Nick. Do you know that?'

'Oh, yes. So remind me, then, why not?'

'I cannot come away with you. I am a married woman. With children. And a life.'

'Great! So there's a husband to look after the children while you come away with me. And it's not so much of a life that you haven't been seeing me for weeks now.'

'Seeing you is one thing. Going away for a weekend is another altogether.' Which it was. So far there had been laughing and kissing and, last week, what might be described as fondling, but a weekend meant bed and s.e.x. Scary, and exciting and... scary and... exciting.

'Which is why I want to do it. Come on, Hats, you know you want it.'

His pantomime City-boy lines didn't grate. She was feeling persuaded.

'I know you. I remember how... resourceful you can be. You can make this happen. If you want to.'

He didn't know her, of course. That was the whole point. She hadn't ever thought of herself as particularly resourceful, and wasn't sure what student endeavour he was referring to, if any. But she could make it happen. She'd figured all that out ages ago. She had a friend in Norfolk, Sally, who had been trying to get her to come and visit for ages. She and Tim had avoided it because Sally's kids were much older than Josh and Chloe. And obnoxious. And because Sally had cream linen furniture. And Tim hated her husband, Ian, who was a pompous git in property development, whose opening conversational gambit with anyone he ever met was 'What's your gaff worth, then?' She could say she was giving in to Sally. Agreeing to meet her somewhere, maybe a health farm. No danger whatsoever of Tim ringing Ian to check. And the beauty of mobiles was that you never had to give contact numbers you were your own destination. Oh, yes, she'd thought about it. 'Why should I?'

'Because you want to find out what it would be like. Because you're tired of kissing me standing up in doorways. Because you're dying to show me that b.u.t.terfly you told me about.'

And the killer blow. 'Because you're terrified that your life is pa.s.sing you by and you haven't taken a risk for years. Because you're bored. Oh, and because I'm as h.o.r.n.y as h.e.l.l.'