Before I Knew You Page 30

  ‘Headmaster of the only cathedral school in New York,’ he galloped on. ‘Sophie – can you believe it? I’m still pinching myself. Thank God for that house-swap, that’s all I can say, and Geoff for instigating it and Ann and the Stapletons and – bloody everything.’ He tipped more wine into his glass and drank deeply. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not pleased,’ he said, putting down his glass. ‘Please don’t tell me that.’

  ‘Of course I’m pleased … I’m thrilled … for you.’

  ‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. But there’s a “but”, isn’t there? I can feel one coming on …’ He cast his eyes skyward, as if seeking patience – inspiration – from the glittering ball of a lampshade suspended above their table. ‘It wouldn’t be until the summer at the earliest – I have to give at least a term’s notice – so it’s not as if there won’t be loads of time to prepare. Sophie, after the year we’ve had – all your trouble … I thought you’d be pleased. It was New York, after all – the holiday - that sorted you out, wasn’t it? Given that alone, I would have thought you’d leap at the chance to live there. I thought, God help me …’ he studied his wine glass, clenching his jaw, his expression darkening ‘… I thought that this – coming here – would be something of a celebration.’ When still Sophie did not speak he flung himself back in his seat, shaking his head in bewilderment. ‘Come on, then, out with it – the but.’ He held out both hands, curling his fingers towards his palms in the manner of one inviting an adversary to fight.

  Sophie looked up at the studded silver globe over their heads. Some invisible jet of air had started it spinning, taking reflected bits of her and Andrew with it. There was a new hardness to him, a curt impatience. It was like being talked at by a stranger. And the volte-face on Ann – where had that come from? A minor matter, perhaps, but its significance felt huge. And yet while Andrew had been talking a lot of things had fallen into place too – the intensity of the preparations for the New York trip, the manic energy since tumbling off the coach, as well as deeper realizations connected to his hunger for this job, his ambitions for their daughters and his view of her. ‘But Ann is so silly,’ she murmured. ‘I thought we thought Ann was silly … didn’t we?’

  Andrew rolled his eyes. ‘What has that got to do with anything? I – we – misjudged her. Ann has been unbelievable – clever, helpful, tireless.’

  Sophie pushed away her wine glass and shifted her weight forwards so that she was sitting on the edge of her chair, both feet squarely planted on the ground. She pressed her toes into the soles of her shoes, instinctively seeking further stability. She had never opposed Andrew before – at least, not on anything big. She had been the muse, she reminded herself, the peacemaker, the homemaker … until her illness. But he hadn’t liked that, had he? she remembered suddenly. Her low spirits – that had been the start of all the trouble. ‘There isn’t one “but”,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘There are at least four.’

  ‘I’m not turning it down.’ He folded his arms. ‘I can’t turn it down. Sophie, please don’t ask me to turn it down.’

  Sophie met his gaze. She felt rotten inside, close to tears. ‘But what about me? I don’t want to live in New York …’

  ‘But in August you were so happy there –’

  ‘That was Connecticut –’

  ‘Well, we’ll live in Connecticut, then – I’ll work something out.’

  ‘But St Joseph’s – you’re going to be head …’

  ‘Says who? You want me to pin my life on a rumour? And this is so much better – in another league.’

  ‘Olivia has set her heart on an English university –’

  ‘Olivia is nearly eighteen – are you telling me she won’t like visiting New York in her vacations?’

  ‘Milly doesn’t want to go to the Juilliard any more.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not nonsense. She told me tonight, sobbing – in pieces – worried about how angry you would be –’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘She said she wanted to go to the Royal College after all, that she didn’t like Meredith …’ Sophie stopped. The colour had drained from Andrew’s face. ‘Odd, I agree, but –’

  ‘You said something to her,’ he growled, ‘you must have done.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Music – you feel threatened by it, that’s why. You always have. Because you can’t do it.’

  They looked at each other, the air around them vibrating.

  ‘And Gareth has offered me a job,’ Sophie pressed on, in a shrunken voice. ‘He’s bought next door and is expanding the college and wants me to be a partner and head of studies – he’s drawing up contracts and everything.’

  ‘There’ll be loads of chances to teach in New York.’

  ‘Not like this … This, for the first time in my life, would be a proper job. And there’s something else.’ Sophie dropped her eyes to the wine bar’s scuffed parquet floor. Feeling like a person stepping blindfold off a cliff, she proceeded to tell him about Carter. They were so in the thick of it by then, so past any point of return, that to stick to her resolve of total honesty seemed the only thing to do. The American’s unwanted attentions weren’t a factor in themselves, she explained – certainly not now that Andrew knew how they had come into being – but they certainly weren’t an incentive either for hurling herself back across the Atlantic.

  Sophie wasn’t sure what she expected – hurt, astonishment, disappointment, requests for ugly details. But nothing prepared her for the slap of Andrew’s palm across her face.

  The waiter started, then looked away. Sophie sat motionless, her cheek throbbing.

  So she was avoiding an old lover, Andrew snarled, once they were out in the street. So she had treated him like shit and seduced a total stranger. No wonder she had enjoyed the house swap – no bloody wonder. He would go to New York without her. He didn’t need her. He didn’t need anyone capable of behaving like that.

  He walked fast. Sophie ran alongside, gabbling: breathless explanations, pleadings to be forgiven, to be understood, to be allowed to accompany him to America as his wife, his slave … anything. All her rationale for resistance, even Andrew’s cruel words – seemed, in this new crisis, remote to the point of insignificance.

  But something in Andrew seemed to have been unleashed. At their front gate, with Sophie drained of words at last, her face blotched with tears, he stopped, allowing her a moment of hope. She said his name – a last begging sob. He gripped the gate latch, not looking at her. He had once thought her special, he said, his voice brittle. He had once thought her special and different. Because of Tamsin. Because of Tamsin he had dared to believe that Sophie might offer the same faultless devotion to a husband.

  Without another word he strode into the house, fetched the spare-room bedding and set up camp on the sofa.

  Why the sofa? Why not the spare bed? Sophie was too crushed, too shocked even to ask. Upstairs alone, wide awake, she learnt that guilt had a taste beyond the reach of toothbrushes or mouth-swilling. She had a wonderful husband, yet she had driven him away. What a fool, what a bloody fool. Several times she crept downstairs to peek into the sitting room, fighting the urge to drop to her knees and howl. He looked so peaceful, curled on his right side, knees and arms bent, one hand tucked under his cheek. How was that possible, to look so peaceful, to sleep?

  Turning wretchedly for the stairs, she thought of William Stapleton occupying exactly the same spot a few weeks and a lifetime before. What would Andrew make of the full truth of that night? she wondered bitterly. Her and William talking late, an extraordinary intimate exchange of life-thoughts and life-stories, somehow made possible by the quiet of the kitchen and the innocent steam of their tea. William’s woes – the torment of being stretched between two families, his ex-wife’s illness – had made her wince with Schadenfreude and sympathy. In return, she had spoken of her own hiatus – the fog of negativity – that had descen
ded earlier in the year. She had even referred, obliquely, to the business with Carter – the restorative kindness of a stranger, the paradox (so ironic in retrospect) of it strengthening her marriage. Instead of flinching, William had nodded, as if such twists in a life were entirely to be expected, entirely normal. With the result that Sophie had slipped back to bed that night with the lightest of hearts, feeling not only purged but forgiven, marvelling not for the first time that so sweet a man could be even remotely allied to a creature who had been so ready to use the same information to cause her distress.

  Inspired by the memory of that sense of forgiveness now, Sophie made her way back down to the sitting room. Andrew had shifted onto his other side, facing the back of the sofa. She touched his shoulder, stroked it; then his cheek. He knew she was there – she was sure – he had to; but still he didn’t move.

  For the final climb of the stairs Sophie’s pace was slow, her limbs leaden. The girls, sealed along the passageway behind their own bedroom doors, felt like part of a previous existence, a lost paradise.

  He had drunk too much, she consoled herself next, blinking in the dark. That was why his reaction had been so extreme, so cruel … The remarks about music – about Tamsin – they weren’t from the Andrew she knew. The wine had been strong and he had been exhausted, that was it. Jet-lagged, just like William that time. The Carter thing had touched a nerve, but she would make him see sense. In the morning she would explain it all again and he would understand and be glad. She would turn Gareth’s offer down and go to New York, as she should have agreed to from the start.

  But when she awoke the only trace of Andrew was the imprint of his head on a sofa cushion. In an envelope propped next to the telephone was a short message: I need to think. Please don’t call. I have taken my suitcase and a few things.

  PART THREE

  20

  Beth tugged the last of the baubles off the tree and dropped it into the box, along with a shower of pine needles. Deprived of its decorations, the sorry state of the plant was laid bare, a poor dry browning version of its once verdant self. A ten-foot Norwegian Blue – it had cost the earth. When she had said she was going to Florida the tree was the one thing the realtor had strongly recommended leaving in place until the traditional January deadline. Even with Christmas having passed, such touches helped close a sale, the woman had explained in the singsong nasal voice that made Beth want to press her hands over her ears. Buyers inclined towards houses in which people appeared to have lived happily, she had gone on, adding, with an indelicacy so cruel that Beth decided it had to have been unintentional, that in these hard times the empty property of a separating couple needed all the help it could get.

  But waking that morning to the eerie creak of the for-sale board swinging in the bitter January wind, Beth had found herself unable to concentrate on her packing with the tree presiding – as it seemed to – over the ground floor. The glittering show, the suggestion of celebration – it was too much. She hadn’t dismantled so much as attacked it, twisting and snapping branches in her haste to get every ornament, every last trace of tinsel, out of her sight.

  Once the job was done, she picked up the box and took it out into the yard, leaving it first by the trash and then transferring it to the small cordoned-off area on the edge of the garden near the kitchen where William, in happier times, had lit the occasional bonfire. She was kneeling, icy fingers cupped in mounting desperation round a weak flickering blue flame of an old gas cookout lighter, when her concentration was broken by the noise of a car pulling up in the drive. William. Could it be William, in spite of everything? Beth dropped the gas lighter and flew, hearing already the words he would have ready for her: I was wrong. Of course I haven’t stopped loving you. Of course I understand why you lied. My sons matter less than you and always will. I’m coming back to New York, back to our idyllic life together. Life without you has no meaning …

  But it wasn’t William, it was Ann Hooper, in a stunning calf-length red overcoat and suede boots with fur trim. At the sight of Beth she held her arms open, as if genuinely entertaining the unlikely notion that Beth might consider running into them, rather than stopping in astonishment that so faint an acquaintance (born out of an only slightly firmer friendship between their husbands) should come calling three days into this already hateful New Year without warning or invitation. She had come to gloat, Beth guessed bleakly. Nancy had done the same the week before, making a thinly veiled effort to disguise the fact by announcing that she and Carter were off on a three-week vacation, then producing a tray-bake and a bottle of sweet wine while she fished for details behind the for-sale sign and what had gone wrong.

  A life in pieces – a real life: what better entertainment was there? Beth’s defence to Nancy had been to lie, using the poignant, palatable fiction already offered to her other local friends that her and William’s relationship had buckled under the insupportable strain of trying for a child. William hadn’t been able to share her maternal yearnings, she had expanded to her neighbour, tears pricking her eyes, thanks to unhappy experiences of parenting during his first marriage.

  It was only when Nancy flexed the thin arcs of her eyebrows in a show of not entirely buying this story, probing for further elaboration, that Beth had dug deeper into her armoury and slung out the fact of her knowledge of Carter’s relationship with Sophie Chapman. She was sorry, she told Nancy, but it had been eating her up for months and sisters had to look out for each other, didn’t they?

  Oh, the Englishwoman, Nancy had trilled, taking the hint, gathering her things to leave, batting the air with her manicured nails between attending to the buttons on her coat. Of course, she had known about that. With Carter, she always knew: he was an open book, not so much a bastard as a foolish old goat who got crushes. During his scriptwriting days it had been actresses. The English girl was one in a long line. They were always one-sided things, meaning nothing and leading nowhere.

  Air kisses of farewell, unnecessary advice to serve the wine chilled and reheat the tray-bake had followed, leaving Beth to ponder the fine line between thespian skill and a show of truth. Whatever lay behind the display, she had experienced a grim twinge of admiration at Nancy for managing it. Who, after all, was anyone beyond what they tried to be? If only William had understood that they might still be together. But among the torture of being told he no longer loved her, that the marriage had been a mistake, that selling up was the only way to rebalance his finances, that he wanted to return – alone – to face the responsibilities awaiting him in London, there had been the stinging accusation that he had never really known her, that the person he thought he loved simply didn’t exist.

  Ann dropped her arms, her face creasing with concern as Beth approached. ‘Aren’t you cold, my dear? Out here without a coat and so … but my goodness, so slim.’

  ‘Ann, I’m real busy, if you don’t mind … ’

  ‘Oh, Beth, please don’t think I’m intruding. I was just so sorry to hear about you and William and since I was in the area I thought I’d drop by, just to see how you were doing … to ask if there was anything –’

  ‘I’m fine, really. William and I have had some issues, that’s all. But there’s still a good chance we’ll work them out. Choosing to live out here wasn’t right, I can see that now. Darien is a place for families rather than couples … Look, Ann, I appreciate you coming, but now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of packing to do. I leave for Florida this afternoon. Some time out with my mom – after the Christmas I’ve had, I’m kind of in need of it.’

  ‘You weren’t on your own for the holiday, were you?’ Ann’s voice spilt incredulous dismay.

  ‘I wanted to be. Like I said, there’s been a lot to do.’

  Ann eyed her doubtfully. ‘And you’re sure there’s nothing I can …?’

  ‘Certain, thanks.’ Beth hugged herself, rubbing her arms, not because she minded the cold, but in the hope of encouraging her visitor to leave.

  Ann obligingly open
ed her car door but then paused to stare wistfully past Beth’s shoulder at the house. Its elegance was irrefutable, but in the grey wintry light, with the towering surround of trees, its lemon walls and white shutters looked somehow inappropriate and washed out, like a shell removed from the glowing waters of a rock pool. It was even colder out here than in the city; a weird, dry cold that caused each intake of breath to burn her throat and nose, as if strep germs and all sorts of other horrors were busy trying to burrow into her bloodstream.

  ‘It’s a tragedy, that’s what it is,’ she declared briskly, completing her manoeuvre into the car. ‘Two wonderful people, a wonderful house – the Chapmans loved it …’ She paused, leaving the car door open while she tugged off her gloves, plucking the thin expensive leather off the end of each finger. ‘But, unbelievably, they’ve split up too now. It’s all just too sad for words.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Beth stepped closer, thinking she must have misheard.

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s heart-breaking.’ Ann placed the gloves carefully on the passenger seat and twisted her head to give Beth’s sudden show of interest her full attention. ‘Andrew has been offered the most amazing job – head of St Thomas’s Cathedral School, in New York – but Sophie has refused to accompany him. There’s someone else apparently. Andrew’s heart-broken.’

  ‘Someone in England?’

  Ann hesitated, wary suddenly of the alertness in Beth’s tone. And there was a faint whiff of alcohol coming off the woman too, which was disconcerting. The news of the Chapman separation was something she was still digesting, mulling over its implications. ‘No one knows for sure. Andrew’s not the sort to talk. But he has certainly hinted that that’s the case and it wouldn’t make sense otherwise, would it? Twenty years together, he gets the job of a lifetime and she bales out. But, then, I’ve never been entirely convinced that Sophie knew quite how lucky she was with that man …’ Ann pressed her lips into a tight line. ‘But none of this is helping you, Beth dear, is it? So I’ll be on my way. Good luck with working things out. And get inside this instant – you’re blue.’ She shook her head ruefully as she slammed the door.