My Husband's Wife(113)

‘I think,’ said Rupert with a glance at Ed’s dark face, ‘I should go. Katie – my fiancée – will be waiting for me.’

So she was still around. All her hopes, all her desperate, crazy ideas that she’d had when Rupert had rung the bell, came crashing down.

‘Fiancée?’ scoffed Ed, barely waiting for the door to close on their visitor. ‘I’ll bet. How many times has that kid been round here?’

His voice made Poppy stir in her carrycot at the far end of the kitchen. (Ed would not let her out of their sight.)

‘What do you mean?’

Ed’s face was close now. ‘I saw you blush when he came in. I saw how you tried to speak normally.’ Spit was flying out of his mouth. ‘He has the same colour hair as our daughter. If she is our daughter.’

‘Don’t be so ridiculous. You know your grandfather had red hair. You yourself have commented on how it often skips a generation.’

He had her wrists now, squeezing them hard. ‘How very convenient! But we both know what your morals are like.’

Struggling, she spat back, ‘And what about yours? You didn’t mind leaving your wife for me, did you?’

‘And you didn’t mind tempting me away from her.’

What happened next? What happened next? How many times was she to be asked that in the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months.

All Carla knew was this. It was sudden.

All she cared to remember was this.

There was a scream. Poppy from the carrycot. Another scream. Her own as Ed began to shake her by the shoulders.

The carving knife.

The green-handled carving knife. Another possession which Lily had left behind.

A terrible, body-shaking groan.

Blood.

And then running. Running across the park with all those thoughts racing up and down and side to side.

I hate him. I hate him.

Mamma! Where are you?

If only they could start all over again.





55


Lily


October 2015


‘A man has been found stabbed to death in his West London home. It is thought that …’

Then Tom’s shout drowns out the radio. ‘You’ve got to do it first, Mum! I’ve told you before.’

How stupid of me. I know perfectly well that Tom needs me to buckle up my seat belt before he does his. Precisely four seconds before him, actually. He times it with his watch. It’s another of his rituals. One which, on a normal day, is surely not too difficult to follow.

But for some reason I am feeling wobbly today. Perhaps I’m still tired after being in London yesterday. Perhaps it’s the impending meeting with Tom’s headmistress about the recent ‘incident’. Perhaps it’s because I’ve got a particularly tricky appointment with an NHS official this afternoon, concerning another set of lost notes following the birth of an oxygen-deprived child. Or perhaps it’s because I am infuriated by Ed’s latest declaration that he wants full-time custody of our son.

I start the engine, telling myself that there are plenty of men who live in that part of London. Stabbings happen every day. There is no reason – none at all – why it should be someone I know. But my skin has begun to form goose pimples of its own accord. At the T-junction, I take a left and then stop – over the line – just in time to allow a motorbike, which is surely going too fast, to go before me.

‘That motorcyclist could have died if you hadn’t stopped,’ comments Tom in a matter-of-fact tone.

Thanks.

‘He could have been left with only part of his brain, like Stephen,’ he continues. ‘Did you know that your skin weighs twice as much as your brain?’

He’s probably right. Tom usually is. But it’s Stephen I’m thinking of: the boy who has just joined Tom’s class. His pram had been hit by a lorry when he was just under a year old. The driver had been having a heart attack at the time. No one could blame him. Not even Stephen, who is quite happy in his own world. Not even his parents, who are devout Christians and claim it is their ‘challenge’ in life. It puts the rest of us to shame.

Including Ed. How on earth does he think he can ask for sole custody? He can barely make his father/son weekends, often cancelling at the last minute. It’s happened more and more since Carla had the baby. She hasn’t been well, apparently.

‘Look out,’ says Tom sharply, at the same time as the lorry on the other side of the road hoots loudly.

What’s happening to me? I’m not just driving badly. It’s not just the wet autumn leaves that made me skid just then. I’m completely losing concentration. But when your husband’s wife has just had a child, it does things to you. Until then, Ed and I had shared something (or rather someone) that neither of us had done with anyone else. It had created a bond which couldn’t be broken. But now he’ll be lying next to Carla, his arm around her. They will be looking at their baby – a girl, Ross tells me – with the kind of awe that Ed and I had when we first gazed at Tom. Ed will be telling her, as he told me, that she has been so brave. And he will be promising, as he did me, that he will be the best father he can possibly be.

At night, he would get up when the baby cried out. (Ed always insisted on that, bringing Tom back to bed with us so I could feed him, propped up against the pillows.) He would – I can see it so clearly! – feed his new baby daughter with milk which Carla has expressed into a bottle for night-time convenience. And he would be drawing them, sketching furiously as they slept, his charcoal sweeping over the page with love and tenderness.